Annal:2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Reformation: A History
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.54
The Reformation and Counter-Reformation represented the greatest upheaval in Western society since the collapse of the Roman Empire a millennium before. The consequences of those shattering events are still felt today—from the stark divisions between (and within) Catholic and Protestant countries to the Protestant ideology that governs America, the world’s only remaining superpower.
In this masterful history, Diarmaid MacCulloch conveys the drama, complexity, and continuing relevance of these events. He offers vivid portraits of the most significant…
- 2005 Anthony-Critical nominee
- 2004 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 18.55
The life of a New York City police officer, with the NYPD running through his veins: a highly anticipated nonfiction epic—destined to be a classic.
Blue Blood is an important book about what it means to protect, to serve, and to defend among the ranks of New York’s finest. Conlon’s canvas is great and complicated—he is fourth generation NYPD—and the story he tells is impossibly rich: it presents an anecdotal history of New York through its police force, and depicts a vivid portrait of the teeming street life of the city in all its horror and splendor.…
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
- 2004 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2005 Pulitzer–History finalist
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.54
In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed…
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.”
—from the Introduction
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate…
Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
- 2004 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel, a rough man with a criminal record and ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased Marrow, beat him unmercifully, and killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. In the words of a local prosecutor: “They shot him like you or I would kill a snake.”
Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the…
