National Book Award for Non-Fiction

awarded since 1950

 

2012 selection

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2012, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest 2012

by Katherine Boo

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY

The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today •...


2010 selection

Just Kids

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2010

by Patti Smith

Due to copyright restrictions, this eBook may not contain all of the images available in the print edition.

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter...


2009 selection

The First Tycoon

Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography 2010, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2009

by T.J. Stiles

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through...


2007 selection

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2007

by Tim Weiner

With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency...


2006 selection

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2006

by Timothy Egan

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.

 

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains...


2005 selection

The Year of Magical Thinking

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2005

by Joan Didion

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...


2004 selection

Arc of Justice

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2004

by Kevin Boyle

An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle

In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent...


2003 selection

Waiting For Snow In Havana

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2003

by Carlos Eire

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly...


2001 selection

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas Of Depression

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2001

by Andrew Solomon

With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Andrew Solomon takes the reader on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution...


2000 selection

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2000

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Non-Fiction!

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex...


1997 selection

American Sphinx

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1997

by Joseph J. Ellis

National Bestseller 

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political...


1996 selection

An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1996

by James Carroll

An American Requiem is the story of one man's coming of age. But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political,...


1995 selection

The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1996, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1995

by Tina Rosenberg

The Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe

From the Trade Paperback edition.


1989 selection

From Beirut to Jerusalem

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1989

by Thomas L. Friedman

This revised edition of the number-one bestseller and winner of the 1989 National Book Award includes the Pulitzer Prize Winning author's new, updated epilogue.


1988 selection

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1989, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1988

by Neil Sheehan

In this magisterial book, a monument of history and biography that was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, renowned journalist Neil Sheehan tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel...


1985 selection

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

1984 selection

The Life of Andrew Jackson

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1984

by Robert V. Remini

Robert V. Remini's prize-winning, three-volume biography Life of Andrew Jackson won the National Book Award on its completion in 1984 and is recognized as one of the greatest lives of a U.S. President. In this...


1982 selection

The Soul of A New Machine

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1982, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1982

by Tracy Kidder

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish...


1981 selection

China Men

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1981

by Maxine Hong Kingston

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

From the Trade Paperback...


1954 selection

A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

Pulitzer Prize for History 1954, National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1954

by Bruce Catton

When first published in 1953, Bruce Catton, our foremost Civil War historian was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for excellence in nonfiction.  This final volume of The Army of...