Annal:1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior
- 1999 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.49
Looking over the shoulder of some of the premier scientists in the filed, Jonathan Weiner takes us into their laboratories to show us how pieces of DNA actually shape behavior. He focuses on the work of Seymour Benzer, who, decades ago, with James Watson and Francis Crick, helped to crack the genetic code. Then, in a simple experiment using a few test tubes, a light bulb, and 100 fruit flies, Benzer invented the genetic dissection of behavior. Now we see how he and his students find and study genes that build our inner clocks, genes that shape the way we love,…
Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History
- 1999 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.49
Amid the turmoil after her father’s death—family decisions to be made, the future of their farm to be settled—Jane Brox begins a search for her family’s story. The search soon leads her to the fascinating and quintessentially American history of New England’s Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age. At the Center of Brox’s journey through family history is a poignant question: How can her own family identity—language, food, a grandfather’s wish for “five thousand days like this one”—be recovered, when so…
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
- 2000 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1999 LATimes–History winner
- 1999 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 1999 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- 1999 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 42.5
The first definitive history of the transformation of Japanese society under American occupation after World War II. This major new work by America’s foremost historian of modern Japan draws on a vast range of Japanese sources to offer an extraordinarily thorough, complex, and rich analysis of how shattering defeat in World War II followed by over six years of military occupation by the United States affected every level of Japanese society-in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. Here is the history of an extraordinary moment in the…
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
- 1999 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.49
One of our most elegant and thoughtful memoirists reflects on memory and imagination. Memoir, that landscape bordered by memory and imagination, has become the signature genre of our age. In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl moves back and forth between a series of story-like recollections and essays in which she considers how she has been “enchanted or bedeviled” by autobiographical writing —her own and that of others. Subjects engaging Hampl’s attention are her family’s response to her personal writing; a secret that an old Czech migr tries to confide in…
The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena
Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Patricia Clancy
- 1999 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.49
From 1815, the year of his defeat at Waterloo, to 1821, the year of his death, Napoleon was exiled, a prisoner of the British on the island of St. Helena. Although Napoleon was free to move about the island, as his time in the tropics wore on, he increasingly chose seclusion. Napoleon tried to survive on a diet of memories, which he recounted to the few people left around him. But, as Jean-Paul Kauffmann discovered, Napoleon had been poisoned—by nostalgia for his days of glory and grief for the past. Part travelogue, part history, The Black Room at Longwood is informed by a grimly personal element—the author’s own three-year captivity as a hostage in Beirut.
