Annal:2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2006. 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.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography winner
- 2006 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.56
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer’s search for the truth behind his family’s tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
The Afterlife: A Memoir
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 6.56
In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother’s death from cancer and malnourishment, Donald Antrim, author of absurdist, visionary masterworks began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist and teacher who was, at her worst, a ferociously destabilized and destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married Louanne twice.
The Afterlife is not a temporally linear coming-of-age memoir…
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 6.56
Meet Alison’s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter’s complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books.
- 2007 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 18.57
In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate, Shayna Weiss, make a cross-country bike trip. They pitch a tent in the desert of central Oregon. As they are sleeping, a man in a pickup truck deliberately runs over the tent. He then attacks them with an ax. The horrific crime is reported in newspapers across the country. No one is ever arrested. Both women survive, but Shayna suffers from amnesia, while Terri is left alone with memories of the attack. Their friendship is shattered.
Fifteen years later, Terri returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered, on the first of many visits she will make “to solve the crime that would solve me.”
Stuart: A Life Backwards
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 18.56
Stuart, A Life Backwards, is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator (a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander) and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison. Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards.
With humour, compassion (and exasperation) Masters slowly works back through post-office heists, prison riots and the exact day Stuart discovered violence, to unfold the…
