Annal:2002 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Master of the Senate: Volume 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- 2003 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 2002 LATimes–Biography winner
- 2002 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 36.53
Book Three of Robert A. Caro’s monumental work, The Years of Lyndon Johnson—the most admired and riveting political biography of our era—which began with the best-selling and prizewinning The Path to Power and Means of Ascent.
Master of the Senate carries Lyndon Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.
It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues…
When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution
- 2002 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
From one of the leading public-health experts of our time, a passionate call to arms to protect ourselves from environmental pollution—and an astonishing revelation of how it’s already affected our health.
In When Smoke Ran Like Water, the world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis confronts the public triumphs and private failures of her lifelong battle against environmental pollution.
By turns impassioned and analytic, she documents the shocking toll of a public-health disaster—300,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and Europe from the effects of pollution—and asks why we remain silent. She shows how environmental toxins contribute to a broad spectrum of human diseases, including breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and emphysema—all major killers—and in addition how these toxins affect the health and development of the heart and lungs, and even alter human reproductive capacity.
But the battle against pollution is not just scientific. For Davis, it’s personal: pollution is what killed many in her family and forced the others, survivors of the 1948 smog emergency…
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
- 2002 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine.
Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one’s own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won’t go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles…
- 2002 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 12.52
In The Last American Man, acclaimed journalist and fiction writer Elizabeth Gilbert offers a fresh cultural examination of contemporary American male identity and the uniquely American desire to return to the wilderness.
Gilbert explores what pushed men to settle the frontier West in the nineteenth century and delves into the history of American utopian communities. But her primary focus is on the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway, who left his comfortable suburban home at the age of seventeen to move into the Appalachian Mountains, where for the last twenty years he has lived off the land.
Conway’s romantic character challenges all our assumptions about what it means to be a man today; he is a symbol of much that we feel our men should be, but rarely are. From his example, Gilbert delivers an intriguing exploration into the meaning of American manhood and-from the point of view of a woman-refracts masculine American identity in all its conflicting elements. Like Jon Krakauer’s national bestseller Into the Wild, this book will find an enthusiastic audience among women, readers of American history, and those interested in nature and the wild.
Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes
- 2002 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
In this sweeping narrative of the past 150,000 years of human history, Steve Olson draws on new understandings in genetics to reveal how the people of the world came to be.
Traveling across four continents, Olson describes the African origins of modern humans and the migration of our ancestors throughout the world. He offers a genealogy of all of humanity, explaining, for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius as their forebears and how the history of the Jewish people jibes with, and diverges from, biblical accounts. He shows how groups of people differ and yet are the same, exploding the myth that human races are a biological reality while demonstrating how the accidents of history have resulted in the rich diversity of people today.
Celebrating both our commonality and our variety, Mapping Human History is a masterful synthesis of the human past and present that will forever change how
we think about ourselves and our relations with others.
