Annal:1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
- 1995 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- Score: 20.45
On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin’s finches and come up with a new understanding of…
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story
- 1995 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of non-fiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable…
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
- 1994 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 1995 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.44
There is a vast literature on death and dying, but there are few reliable accounts of the ways in which we die. The intimate accounts of how various diseases take away life offered in How We Die, is not meant to prompt horror or terror but to demythologize the process of dying. Though the avenues of death—AIDS, cancer, heart attack, Alzheimer’s, accident, and stroke—are common, each of us will die in a way different from any that has gone before. Each one of death’s diverse appearances is as distinctive as that singular face we each show during our lives.…
