Annal:2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.51
With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Andrew Solomon takes the reader on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.
The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and…
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
In 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young civil liberties attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. Lowry’s contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood had been shaped by the system’s inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to…
American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
From her father’s genteel Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet from her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner.
Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American, an individual whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child…
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town’s Jews. Neighbors tells their story.
This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature.
Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by…
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
In this remarkable collection of essays, David James Duncan, award-winning author of The River Why, braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. The twenty-two essays in this collection swirl and eddy around the author’s early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, logic, science, and humor, Duncan relates…
