National Book Awards; Nonfiction Finalists
The Nonfiction Finalists, just announced on Morning Joe: (annotations from the National Book Foundation)
Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
RH/Doubleday
Iron Curtain describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete, how political parties, the church, the media, young people’s organizations―the institutions of civil society on every level―were eviscerated, how the secret police services were organized, how ethnic cleansing was carried out, and how some people were forced to collaborate while others managed to resist.
Katherine Boo
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Random House
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.
Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
RH/Knopf
The fourth installment in Robert Caro’s monumental work on President Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power follows Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career: 1958 to 1964
Domingo Martinez
The Boy Kings of Texas
Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press
Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. First Book
Anthony Shadid
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
In the spring of 2011, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went to his ancestral home, Marjayoun, Lebanon…to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures, and tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid died on February 16, 2012 from an asthma attack while on assignment on the Syrian border.