Annal:1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
- 1997 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 1996 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1996 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 30.47
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father,…
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
- 1996 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Born into a missionary family, Pearl Buck lived the first half of her life in China and was bilingual from childhood. Although she is best known, perhaps, as the prolific author of The Good Earth and as a winner of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Buck in fact led a career that extended well beyond her eighty works of fiction and nonfiction and deep into the public sphere. Passionately committed to the cause of social justice, she was active in the American civil rights and women’s rights movements; she also founded the first international adoption agency. She was an outspoken advocate of racial understanding, vital as a cultural ambassador between the United States and China at a time when East and West were at once suspicious and deeply ignorant of each other.
Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn
- 1996 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life,” and “Something to Live For.” Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by another great composer: his employer, friend, and collaborator, Duke Ellington, with whom he worked as the Ellington Orchestra’s ace songwriter and arranger.
Lush Life, David Hajdu’s sensitive and moving biography of Strayhorn, is a corrective to decades of patchwork scholarship…
- 1996 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
The Last Happy Occasion is the coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the sixties and seventies. In this memoir in six movements, Alan Shapiro recalls how poetry helped him make sense of his own and other people’s lives. Events unfold, including his sister’s death, that make him reconsider the transformative power of art and accept the limitations of poetry in confronting the untransformable pain of mortal loss.
A refreshingly honest, lovingly crafted work, The Last Happy Occasion is a treasure map for anyone interested in…
Charles Ives: A Life With Music
- 1996 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.46
This penetrating study illuminates the life and works of the enigmatic composer/insurance executive Charles Ives, whose experimental works profoundly influenced the course of American classical music in the twentieth century. In his rich and colorful biography, Jan Swafford, himself an established composer, looks at this towering, paradoxical figure and finds the consistencies lying beneath the protean surface. Using what he calls an “Ivesian” approach, Swafford sees the music and the life as forming a single story; one that is firmly rooted in Ives’s Yankee…
