Annal:1992 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.42
The critically and popularly acclaimed coming of age/coming out story from the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. “Witty as it is anguished and as full of understanding as of anger, this is Monette’s best book.” —Booklist
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- 1993 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 18.43
Richard Feynman’s life encompassed the most important discoveries and changes in science in this century. As a boy he tinkered with radios and as a scientist he looked at all things from an unusual and unique perspective. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, was an eccentric and hard-driven perfectionist—a genius indeed. Feynman’s career touched on every area of modern science: from the Manhattan Project to quantum mechanics, to the Space Shuttle Commission. Beyond the importance of the physicist, we learn of a man whose emotional demons made him all the…
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
- 1993 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1992 NBCC–Criticism winner
- 1993 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 32.43
The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.
By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized…
The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction
- 1993 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.43
At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnic and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century—a combination of progress and reaction that defined the…
- 1993 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.43
Hailed by critics as an American masterpiece, David McCullough’s sweeping biography of Harry S. Truman captured the heart of the nation. The life and times of the thirty-third President of the United States, Truman provides a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American.
From Truman’s small-town, turn-of-the-century boyhood and his transforming experience in the face of war in 1918, to his political beginnings in the powerful Pendergast machine and his rapid rise to prominence in the U.S. Senate, McCullough shows a man of uncommon vitality…
