Annal:1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Bad Land: An American Romance
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.46
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders—many of them immigrants—went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso,…
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
- 1997 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1996 LATimes–History finalist
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist*
- Score: 22.47
No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes—mankind’s most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product—with such sweep and enlivening detail. Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process—financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal—are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever…
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
In Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted story-teller, he leads us on a glorious tour—by turns eloquent, witty, and moving—through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student (taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown). He celebrates his rediscovery or new appreciation of such authors as Homer, Plato, the biblical writers, Augustine, Boccaccio, Hegel, Austen,…
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler’s Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that made Hitler’s pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical…
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
As the birthplace of three religions as and many civilizations, the Middle East has for centuries been a center of knowledge and ideas, of techniques and commodities, and, at times, of military and political power. With the histoical—and still growing—importance of the Middle East in modern politics, historian Bernard Lewis’s cogent and scholarly writing brings a wider understanding of the cultures of the region to a popular audience.
In this immensely readable and broad history, Lewis charts the successive transformations of the Middle East, beginning with…
