Annal:2000 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction

Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado

Marc Aronson

• 2001 Sibert winner
• 2000 Horn Book-nonfiction winner
• Score: 20.51

Sir Walter Ralegh played the starring role in a life that was a series of romantic, almost-too-spectacular-to-be-true adventures. From the dazzling court of Queen Elizabeth to the dense jungles of South America, from daring sea raids to the epic struggle against the Spanish Armada, from his luminous historical writings to his intimate poetry, Ralegh left his mark on the age. His life was as dramatic and complex as a Shakespearean play.

Ralegh was a man of great contradictions: He participated in the massacre of Catholics in Ireland, yet later supported religious toleration; he was a calculating courtier resented by many, yet he spoke so eloquently for the rights of individuals that he became a popular hero. His quest to find the legendary city of El Dorado and the fate of the famous Lost Colony he had sponsored in the New World are representative of both the soaring hopes and nightmarish realities that Europeans brought with them across the seas.

In this biography, Marc Aronson passionately reveals the charisma and bravery of a man whose personality could not have been better suited…

Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper's Daughter

Alan Govenar, Shane W. Evans

• 2001 Orbis Pictus honor
• 2000 Horn Book-nonfiction honor
• Score: 12.51

A sharecropper’s daughter describes her childhood in Texas in the early years of the twentieth century.

Sitting Bull and His World

Albert Marrin

• 2000 Horn Book-nonfiction honor
• Score: 6.5

Richly researched, told with sweep, speed, and balance, here is a biography of the man who was arguably the Plains Indians’ most revered, most visionary leader. Tatan’ka Iyota’ke—Sitting Bull—was the great Hunkpapa Lakota chief who helped defeat Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But more than that, he was a profound holy man and seer, an astute judge of men, a singer and speaker for his people’s ways. In the face of the army, the railroad, the discovery of gold, and the decimation of the buffalo, he led his band to Canada rather than “come in” to the white man’s reservation. To render Sitting Bull in context, the author explores the differences in white and Indian cultures in the nineteenth century and shows the forces at work—economic pressure, racism, technology, post-Civil War politics in Washington and in the army—that led to the creation of a continental nation at the expense of a whole people.