Annal:1998 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1998 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.48
First-time author and award-winning journalist Edward Ball confronts the legacy of his family’s slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls’ South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America’s collective memory and experience.
Author Edward Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors owned 25 rice plantations, worked by nearly 4,000 slaves.…
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
- 1998 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 1998 NBCC–Criticism finalist
- Score: 12.48
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of Harold Bloom’s life’s work in reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. It is his passionate and convincing analysis of the way in which Shakespeare not merely represented human nature as we know it today, but actually created it: before Shakespeare, there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there was character, men and women with highly individual personalities—Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth, Rosalind, and Lear, among them. In making his argument, Bloom leads us through…
A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage
- 1998 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
One of those rare occasions when a stunning literary talent and an important subject come together. As many as one in five children face the challenge of growing up with a behavioral disorder. For Beth Kephart’s son, it was “pervasive developmental disorder”—a broad spectrum of difficulties, including autistic features. As the author and her husband discover, all it really means is that their son Jeremy is “different . . . different in a million wonderful ways, and also different in ways that need our help.” In intimate, incandescent prose, Beth Kephart shares…
There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok
- 1998 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
Two million visitors a year enter the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where 1,600 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok constitute what many consider to be the most moving exhibit in the museum—the Tower of Life. Eliach’s nine-century saga of Eastern European Jewish life is richer and fuller than any ever written. Her research took her from family attics on six continents to state archives no scholar had seen since the start of the Cold War. Her research on family life, for example, shows that the “world of our fathers” was actually a world in which…
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
- 1998 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
In All on Fire, William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) emerges as an American hero, arguably on par with Abraham Lincoln, who forced the nation to confront the explosive issue of slavery.
Mayer maintains that Garrison, a self-made man of scanty formal education who founded and edited the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, not only served as the catalyst for the abolition of slavery, but inspired two generations of activists in civil rights and the women’s movement.
Through Garrison, tragically torn between pacifism and abolitionist advocacy, we also…
