Annal:2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.56
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe,…
At Canaan's Edge: Volume 3 of America in the King Years, 1965-68
- 2006 LATimes–History finalist
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2006 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 18.56
At Canaan’s Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.
In At Canaan’s Edge, King and his movement stand at the zenith of America’s defining story, one decade into an epic…
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.
The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie…
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.
A century ago, outsiders saw Chinaas a place where nothing ever changes. Today the coun-try has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China’s…
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
- 2007 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2006 LATimes–History winner
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 26.57
A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright’s remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives…
