Annal:2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2005. 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.
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
- 2005 NBCC–Criticism winner
- Score: 10.55
William Logan has been called both the “preeminent poet-critic of his generation” and the “most hated man in American poetry.” For more than a quarter century, in the keen-witted and bare-knuckled reviews that have graced the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement (London), and other journals, William Logan has delivered razor-sharp assessments of poets present and past. Logan, whom James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has praised as being “the best poetry critic in America,” vividly assays the most memorable and most damning…
Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-millennial South
- 2005 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.55
To read Hal Crowther is to find yourself agreeing with views on topics you never knew you cared so much about. In Gather at the River, Crowther extends the wide-angle vision of Southern life presented in his highly acclaimed collection Cathedrals of Kudzu. He cuts to the heart of recent political, religious, and cultural issues but pauses to appreciate the sweet things that the South has to offer, like music, baseball, great writers, and strong women.
Some of these essays invite debate. Crowther gives a balanced perspective on the tragedy of the Branch…
Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life
- 2005 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.55
Arthur Danto’s new collection finds him, and the art world, at a point when the art world has become pluralistic, even chaotic—with one medium as good as the next—when the moment for “next things” has passed.
Since 1984, when Danto—already an eminent philosopher—became The Nation’s art critic, he has been one of the foremost theorists of contemporary art’s history and evolution, and at the same time the most incisive and illuminating critic of new work. In his view, the historical development of art reached a kind of zenith in the pop period, most…
Still Looking: Essays on American Art
- 2005 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2005 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 12.55
When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike’s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking, a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, “He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it.” In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and from fifty or so articles has selected, for this richly illustrated book, eighteen that deal with American art.
After…
What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles
- 2005 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.55
Essayist Eliot Weinberger sets his sights on the Bush team with brilliant, thought-provoking, funny consequences.
Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot Weinberger’s chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 200l—and an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraq—and picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan,…
