Annal:2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place
- 2003 JT Black-Biography winner
- 2002 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 20.53
In 1858 Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old, a gentleman scientist living quietly at Down House in the Kent countryside, respected by fellow biologists and well liked among his wide and distinguished circle of acquaintances. He was not yet a focus of debate; his “big book on species” still lay on his study desk in the form of a huge pile of manuscript. For more than twenty years he had been accumulating material for it, puzzling over questions it raised, trying—it seemed endlessly—to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. Publication appeared to be as far…
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…
- 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…
- 2002 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.52
Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most remarkable figure in American history: the greatest statesman of his age, he played a pivotal role in the formation of the American republic. He was also a pioneering scientist, a bestselling author, the country’s first postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant, a diplomat, a ladies’ man, and a moralist-and the most prominent celebrity of the eighteenth century. Franklin was, however, a man of vast contradictions, as Edmund Morgan demonstrates in this brilliant biography. A reluctant revolutionary, Franklin had desperately…
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music
Mark Zwonitzer, Charles Hirshberg
- 2002 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.52
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is the first major biography of the Carter Family, the musical pioneers who almost single-handedly established the sounds and traditions that grew into modern folk, country, and bluegrass music—a style celebrated in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A.P. Carter was a restless man, seemingly in a constant state of motion. On one of his travels across the sparsely settled mountains and valleys that surrounded his home in southern Virginia, he met and married a young girl named Sara Dougherty. Orphaned as a child, Sara was…
