Annal:2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2006 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 2005 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 22.55
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night…
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
- 2005 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes from Australia hitchhike to Hawaii in the landing gear of airliners; disruptive European zebra mussels, riding in ships’ ballast water, are infiltrating aquatic ecosystems across the United States; parasitic flies from the U.S. prey on Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos. Predatory American jellyfish in Russia; toxic Japanese plankton in Australia; Burmese pythons in the…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
- 2005 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact, impossibly odd lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century scene as a literary provocateur whose works electrified readers from the start. Rousseau’s impact on American social and political thought remains deep, wide, and, to some, even infuriating. Leo Damrosch beautifully mines Rousseau’s books—The Social Contract, one of the greatest works on political theory and a direct influence on the French and American revolutions; Emile, a ground breaking treatise on…
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
- 2005 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers-reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now.
Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers,…
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
- 2005 LATimes–History winner
- 2005 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.55
In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. This talented group combined a hatred of injustice with uncanny skill in promoting their cause. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London’s smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah…
