Annal:2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
- 2001 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2000 NBCC–Biography winner
- 2000 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 26.51
In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation’s political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern…
The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel
- 2000 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.5
Most people know that Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk who patiently grew his peas in a monastery garden, shaped our understanding of inheritance. But people might not know that Mendel’s work was ignored in his own lifetime, even though it contained answers to the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin’s revolutionary book, On Origin of the Species, published only a few years earlier. Mendel’s single chance of recognition failed utterly, and he died a lonely and disappointed man. Thirty-five years later, his work was rescued from obscurity in a…
- 2000 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.5
Victor Klemperer risked his life to preserve these diaries so that he could, as he wrote, “bear witness” to the gathering hor-ror of the Nazi regime. The son of a Berlin rabbi, Klemperer was a German patriot who served with honor during the First World War, married a gentile, and converted to Protestantism. He was a professor of Romance languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, a fine scholar and writer, and an intellectual of a somewhat conservative disposition.
Unlike many of his Jewish friends and academic colleagues, he feared Hitler from the start,…
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
- 2000 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.5
David Nasaw’s magnificent, definitive biography of William Randolph Hearst is based on newly released private and business papers and interviews. For the first time, documentation of Hearst’s interactions with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and every American president from Grover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt, as well as with movie giants Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Irving Thalberg, completes the picture of this colossal American. Hearst, known to his staff as the Chief, was a man of prodigious appetites. By the 1930s, he controlled the largest publishing…
- 2000 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.5
One of the twentieth century’s towering literary figures comes to life in this definitive biography by the world’s premier authority on Proust.
A bestseller in France, where it was originally published to great critical acclaim, Jean-Yves Tadie’s monumental life of Proust is the first to make use of a wealth of primary material only recently made available. With profound intelligence, analytical perspicuity, and wit, Tadie gives us a masterful portrait of a great artist in his time. Marcel Proust: A Life provides a scrupulously researched and engaging…
