Annal:2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.53
Sons of Mississippi recounts the story of seven white Mississippi lawmen depicted in a horrifically telling 1962 Life magazine photograph—and of the racial intolerance that is their legacy.
In that photograph, which appears on the front of this jacket, the lawmen (six sheriffs and a deputy sheriff) admire a billy club with obvious pleasure, preparing for the unrest they anticipate—and to which they clearly intend to contribute—in the wake of James Meredith’s planned attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi. In finding the stories of these men,…
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
More than two centuries have passed since Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lieutenant Bligh on a small, armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend.
In giving the Bounty mutiny its historical due, Caroline Alexander has chosen to frame her narrative by focusing on the court-martial of the ten mutineers who were captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in England. This fresh perspective…
- 2004 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2003 LATimes–History finalist
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 28.54
The Gulag—the vast array of Soviet concentration camps—was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust.
The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own…
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
Random Family tells the American outlaw saga lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. With an immediacy made possible only after ten years of reporting, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses the reader in the mind-boggling intricacies of the little-known ghetto world. She charts the tumultuous cycle of the generations, as girls become mothers, mothers become grandmothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation.
Two romances thread through Random Family: the sexually…
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
A labor of seventeen years, Vollmann’s first book of non-fiction since 1992’s An Afghanistan Picture Show is a gravely urgent invitation to look back at the world’s long, bloody path and find some threads of meaning, wisdom, and guidance to plot a moral course. From the street violence of prostitutes and junkies to the centuries-long battles between the Native Americans and European colonists,Vollmann’s mesmerizing imagery and compelling logic is presented with authority born of astounding research and personal experience.
