Annal:2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Them: A Memoir of Parents
- 2005 NBCC–Autobiography winner
- Score: 10.55
The much-acclaimed biographer’s unflinchingly honest, wise, and forgiving portrait of her own famous parents: two wildly talented Russian émigrés who fled wartime Paris to become one of New York’s first and grandest power couples.
Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated “white Russian” who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian émigré…
- 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…
Fat Girl: A True Story
- 2005 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 6.55
A nonfiction She’s Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and compulsively readable memoir of obsession with food, and with one’s body, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer.
For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss. From the lush descriptions of food…
Istanbul: Memories and the City
- 2005 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 6.55
A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red.
Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically…
Two Lives: A Memoir
- 2005 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 6.55
A heartrending new book—the story of a marriage and the story of two lives—from the author of the international bestselling novel A Suitable Boy
Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the apparently vigorous but dying Raj and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin—though he could not speak a word of German—to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti’s path first…
