Annal:1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 1997 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.47
For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight—and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was…
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
Bologna, 1858: A police posse, acting on the orders of a Catholic inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. His mother is so distraught that she collapses and has to be taken to a neighbor’s house, but her weeping can be heard across the city. With this terrifying scene—one that would haunt this family forever—David I. Kertzer begins his fascinating investigation of the dramatic kidnapping, and shows how the deep-rooted antisemitism of the…
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
Jamaica Kincaid’s incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother Devon Drew’s life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. Kincaid’s unblinking record of a life that ed too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
The Undertaking was a winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award. A chronicle of small-town life and death told through the eyes of a poet who is also an undertaker. “Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.” So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes…
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography
- 1997 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1998 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.47
Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad—including still-classified KGB dossiers—Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America’s greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers’s days as New York’s “hottest literary…
