Annal:2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
- 2003 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 26.53
A character-driven study of some of the darkest moments in our national history, when America failed to prevent or stop 20th-century campaigns to exterminate Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans .
Drawing upon declassified cables, private papers, exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy-makers, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Samantha Power tells the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of the worst massacres of the twentieth century.
In this masterful work of social…
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
A veteran New York Times war correspondent’s complex, moving, and thought-provoking reflection on how life is lived most intensely in times of war.
General George S. Patton famously said, “Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, I do love it so!” Though Patton was a notoriously single-minded general, it is nonetheless a sad fact that war gives meaning to many lives, a fact with which we have become familiar now that America is once again engaged in a military conflict. War is an enticing elixir. It gives us…
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
Unlike any other reporter, William Langewiesche has had unrestricted access to Ground Zero and the people involved in the cleanup. He has literally followed in the footsteps of engineers, “deconstruction” workers, firemen, and city officials as they tackle the mind-numbing task of bringing order to an instance of chaos unprecedented on our soil.
American Ground is a tour of the interlocking circles of this Dantesque world. With the “knowledge and passion as well as …careful eloquence” for which his reportage is known (New York Times Book Review),…
Brown: The Last Discovery of America
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
America is browning. As politicians, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues America has been brown from its inception, as he himself is.
As a brown man, I think . . .
(But do we really think that color colors thought?)
In his two previous memoirs, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation, Rodriguez wrote about the intersection of his private life with public issues of class and ethnicity. With Brown, his consideration of race, Rodriguez completes his “trilogy…
Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.”
Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll—a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own?
Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces…
