Annal:2000 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
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…
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
- 2000 Aventis-General winner
- 2000 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.5
String theory, many physicists believe, is the key to the unified field theory that eluded Einstein for more than thirty years. At last, science has found a way to overcome the nearly century-old rift between the laws of the large - general relativity - and the laws of the small - quantum mechanics. String theory deftly unites these two pillars of modern physics into a single, harmonious whole by declaring that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe arise from the vibrations of one single entity: microscopically tiny loops of energy that lie deep within…
Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds
- 2000 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
The magnificent story of the natural world’s most epic journeys.
At whatever moment you read these words, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating. If it is spring or fall, the great pivot points of the year, then the continents are swarming with hundreds of millions of traveling birds-a flood so great that even the most ignorant or unobservant notice the skeins of geese and the flocks of robins.
Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world, stitching the continents together in a way that even the…
