Annal:2003 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.53
In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household—and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution.
That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other—but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights aren’t waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The…
- 2004 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2003 LATimes–History finalist
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 28.54
The Gulag—the vast array of Soviet concentration camps—was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust.
The Gulag entered the world’s historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own…
The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
In this intimate and poignant history of a sprawling century-old summer house on Cape Cod, George Howe Colt reveals not just one family’s fascinating story but a vanishing way of life. Faced with the sale of the treasured house where he had spent forty-two summers, Colt returned for one last August with his wife and young children. The Big House, the author’s loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, interweaves glimpses of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the house and of the equally idiosyncratic people who lived…
Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
Bayard Rustin is one of the most important figures in the history of the American civil rights movement. Before Martin Luther King, before Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America’s consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was an African American homosexual.…
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
- 2004 Edgar-Fact Crime winner
- 2003 IHG–Nonfiction winner
- 2003 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- 2003 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 32.54
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace…
