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 philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has had on various demographic populations around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness.
The depth of human experience Solomon chronicles, the range of his intelligence, and his boundless curiosity and compassion will change the reader’s view of the world.
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 the same failing system.
Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby. She was told by child-welfare officials that Shirley had disappeared and that her son was one of thousands of anonymous children whose circumstances are concealed by the veil of confidentiality that hides foster care from public scrutiny. But Bernstein persevered.
The Lost Children of Wilder gives us, in galvanizing and compulsively readable detail,…
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 who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American chica.”
Through Arana’s eyes the reader will discover not only the diverse, earthquake-prone terrain of Peru, charged with ghosts of history and mythology, but also the vast prairie lands of Wyoming, “grave-slab flat,” and hemmed by mountains.
In these landscapes resides a fierce and colorful cast of family members who bring her historia vividly to life, among them Arana’s proud paternal grandfather, Victor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, who…
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 history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne’s Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne’s surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it.
Most arresting…
- 2001 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
