Annal:2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- <–2007
- Pulitzer Prize
- –end–
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
- 2008 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.58
The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims’ willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. The Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedländer’s major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. In this unparalleled work—based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs—the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America
- 2008 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.58
The cigarette—the ultimate icon of our consumer culture—serves as a vehicle for historian Allan Brandt to explore critical aspects of American life. From agriculture to big business, from medicine to politics, The Cigarette Century shows how smoking came to be so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law. In this magisterial book, Brandt demonstrates how the cigarette reflects the most powerful debates of our time about risk, responsibility, and human health. The Cigarette Century reaches across many disciplines to form a broad and compelling synthesis, showing how one humble (and largely useless) product came to play such a dominant role in our lives and deaths.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
- 2007 NBCC–Criticism winner
- 2008 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.57
The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward. Alex Ross, the brilliant music critic for The New Yorker, shines a bright light on this secret world, and shows how it has pervaded every corner of twentieth century life. In the tradition of Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.
