Annal:2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2006. 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.
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
- 2006 NBCC–Criticism winner
- Score: 10.56
From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge — at least, it does through Weschler’s giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art (both contemporary and Renaissance), his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of articles that are sure to illuminuate, educate, and astound.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
- 2006 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.56
For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why—and how—it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma. Not an antireligious screed but an unblinking look beneath the veil of orthodoxy, Breaking the Spell will be read and debated by believers and skeptics alike.
Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
- 2006 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.56
Best-selling author and Berkeley professor of thirty years Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought—Freudian psychoanalytic theory—that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud’s system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience.
On Looking: Essays
- 2006 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.56
Lia Purpura’s daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura’s hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson’s words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.”
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within
- 2006 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 6.56
Bruce Bawer has lived in Europe since 1999. While Europe Slept is his enlightening and disturbing report on anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe and on the egregious failure of European liberals to confront Islamic extremism in their own countries. Traveling to major cities and talking with people in trains, cafés, restaurants, and on street corners, Bawer came face-to-face with the peculiar mix of moralistic smugness and abysmal ignorance that feeds the rising tide of hatred toward the United States. He found, as well, a widespread refusal to grapple with problems caused by a growing Islamic presence in Europe—from the violation of immigration laws to appalling incidents of honor killings to horrific acts of terrorism, including the assassination of a prominent Dutch politician and the March 2003 bombing in Madrid.
