Annal:2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Criticism books
- Criticism authors.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
- 2003 NBCC–Criticism winner
- 2003 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.53
The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the…
Dagoberto Gilb, Cesar A. Martinez
- 2003 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.53
From “an important voice in American fiction” (Annie Proulx), a collection of essays that cuts to the heart of the Mexican-American experience
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Dagoberto Gilb is one of today’s most captivating and provocative fiction writers. Now Gilb offers a collection of essays that brilliantly portrays an artist working to earn respect—and find his place—as a Mexican-American in the literary world and the world at large, to say nothing of his singular and beloved borderland of Texas.
“Gritos” are the exuberant cries in Mexican songs,…
- 2003 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.53
“All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do”
-Nick Hornby
What interests Nick Hornby? Songs, songwriters, everything, compulsively, passionately. Here is his ultimate list of 31 all-time favorite songs. And here are his smart, funny, and very personal essays about them, written with all the love and care of a perfectly mastered mixed tape…
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
- 2003 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.53
In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-nine, Michelangelo had unveiled his masterful statue of David in Florence; however, he had little experience as a painter, even less working in the delicate medium of fresco, and none with the curved surface of vaults, which dominated the chapel’s ceiling. The temperamental Michelangelo was himself reluctant, and he stormed away from Rome,…
- 2003 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.53
A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture—its ubiquity, meanings, and effects
Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity—a daily commonplace in our “society of spectacle.” But are viewers inured -or incited—to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock?
In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography…
