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…
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…
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…
- 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…
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…
