Annal:1994 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
- 1994 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.44
In the tradition of John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. “A moving illumination…Remnick is the witness for us all.”—Wall Street Journal.
The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age
- 1994 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Historian John Lukacs’s brilliant new book offers a provocative summing-up of the twentieth century, that age of iron which began with the guns of August in 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Distinguished by its author’s masterly style and command of detail, The End of the Twentieth Century is a startling examination of where we are today, how we got here, and where we are headed.
Centering on Europe, America, and the relations between the two, Lukacs argues that the major battle of our time has been waged between forms of nationalism rather than between communism and democracy; that the great watershed events have been the two world wars, not the Russian Revolution; and that the century’s radical revolutionary was neither Lenin nor Chairman Mao but Adolf Hitler. The book puts into sharp perspective such events as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the civil war raging in what was Yugoslavia, and the resurgence of right-wing politics in a reunited Germany.
Rather than the end of history, we are now witnessing the end of the modern era, and what awaits…
The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud
- 1994 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
The Victorians, like members of other cultures, gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed to be inferior. But they also sought civilized rationales for their conduct, whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures or for power in the political arena or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.
But that is only part of the story. What makes Peter Gay’s Victorian bourgeois so fascinating is that they debated everything—quite aggressively. While majorities clung to the death penalty or the right to mete out corporal punishment, an increasingly vocal minority attacked these time-honored forms of aggression and denounced them as pathological. While many found it convenient to manipulate evolutionary theories in order to justify aggressive conduct at home and abroad, Others including Darwin’s most authoritative interpreter, Thomas H. Huxley, argued the other side of the coin. Everything from domestic arrangements to women’s rights, higher education,…
