The National Book Award is awarded by the National Book Foundation. Listed here are the winners in the Nonfiction category. Other categories include Fiction, Poetry, Young People's Literature, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
2007
Review
"[B]y using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude." New York Times (read more)
2006
Powells.com Staff Pick
A fresh, stirring look at the Dust Bowl and Depression, Timothy Egan follows the personal dramas of a handful of families, allowing their voices to reveal the environmental and human tragedies that rocked the nation. Grippingly detailed, this exciting yet compassionate work of history is difficult to put down. I enjoyed it to the last page. Recommended by Michal, Powells.com (read more)
2005
Review
"[A] master essayist, great American novelist, and astute political observer....[A] remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief, matched by a penetrating tribute to marriage, motherhood, and love." Booklist (Starred Review) (read more)
2004
Review
"Told with exemplary care and intelligence, this narrative chronicles inflammatory times in black and white America and pays tribute to those heroes who struggled to get Old Jim Crow where he lived. The way history should be written." Kirkus Reviews (read more)
2003
Publisher Comments
In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing... (read more)
2002
Review
"Mr Caro's research spans decades and his command of material is encyclopedic. He drives the story forward irresistibly and makes the arcane almost graphic...If Mr Caro's work on Johnson has not already set a new standard in American political biography, it surely will when his story of Johnson's presidency is complete." The Economist (read more)
2001
Publisher Comments
With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Andrew Solomon takes the reader on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of... (read more)
2000
Publisher Comments
In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page... (read more)
1999
Publisher Comments
A foremost historian examines Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II, giving readers the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted. 75 illustrations.... (read more)
1998
Synopsis
A personal history of slavery in the South, written by a descendant of South Carolina slaveowners who traced the histories of the slave families owned by his ancestors and searched out their descendants. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.... (read more)
1997
Synopsis
A biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by a professor of history at Mount Holyoke.... (read more)
1996
Synopsis
James Carroll's memoir of his father, an Air Force general who helped plan the bombings in Vietnam. Carroll, a young priest at the time, preached against the war in the presence of his father and other Pentagon officials. His father never forgave... (read more)
1995 The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg
1994 How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland
1993 United States: Essays, 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal
1992 Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette
1991 Freedom Volume 1 Freedom in the Making of by Orlando Patterson
1990 The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow
1989 From Beirut To Jerusalem: Updated With a New Chapter by Thomas L. Friedman
1988 A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
1987 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
1986 Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez
1985 Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas
1984 The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 by Robert Vincent Remini
1983 China Alive in the Bitter Sea by Fox Butterfield
1982 The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
1981 China Men by Maxine H Kingston
1980 The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
1979 The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
1978 Winners & Losers by Gloria Emerson
1977 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim
1976 The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
1975 The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas and Marcel Proust by Roger Shattuck
1974 Deeper Into Movies by Pauline Kael
1973 Diderot by Arthur McCandless Wilson
1972 The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (expanded) by Charles Rosen
1971 Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller
1970 An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir by Lillian Hellman
1969 Armies of the Night: History As a Novel\the Novel As History by Norman Mailer
1968 William Troy: Selected Essays by William Troy
1967 Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography by Justin Kaplan
1966 Paris Journal 1944-1965 by Janet Flanner
1965 The Oysters of Locmariaquer by Eleanor Clark
1964 John Keats by Aileen Ward
1963 Henry James, a Life by Leon Edel
1962 The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford
1961 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
1960 James Joyce (revised) by Richard Ellmann
1959 Mistress To an Age: A Life of Madame De Stael by J. Christopher Herold
1958 Lion & the Throne :edward Coke by Catherine D Bowen
1957 Russia Leaves the War Soviet Americ Volume 1 by George F Kennan
1956 American in Italy by Herbert Kubly
1955 Measure of Man on Freedom Human Values by Joseph Wood Krutch
1954 A Stillness At Appomattox by Bruce Catton
1953 The Course of Empire by Bernard Devoto
1952 The Sea Around Us by Rachel L. Carson
1951 Herman Melville by Newton Arvin
1950 Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Rusk
