Adults - National Book Award winners - Nonfiction

1) The yellow house

Author

Broom, Sarah M

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height

...

2) The future is history : how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia

Author

Gessen, Masha

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Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren...

3) Between the world and me

Author

Coates, Ta-Nehisi

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"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth...

4) The unwinding: an inner history of the new America

Author

Packer, George

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
AN NPR BEST BOOK
Selected by New York Times' critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite Book
A Washington Post Best Political Book
A New Republic Best Book

A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation

...

5) Behind the beautiful forevers: life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity

Author

Boo, Katherine

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE
“Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People
“A tour de force of...

6) The swerve: how the world became modern

Author

Greenblatt, Stephen

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Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt's works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion.

7) Just kids

Author

Smith, Patti

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney

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8) The Hemingses of Monticello: an American family

Author

Gordon-Reed, Annette

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Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family, and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.

9) Legacy of ashes: the history of the CIA

Author

Weiner, Tim

Formats:

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This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For over sixty years, the CIA has maintained a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, never disclosing its blunders to the American public. It spun its own truth to the nation while reality lay buried in classified archives. Now, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner offers a stunning indictment of the CIA, a deeply flawed organization that has never deserved

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10) The worst hard time: the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl

Author

Egan, Timothy

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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 in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding...

11) The year of magical thinking

Author

Didion, Joan

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that 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

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12) Waiting for snow in Havana: confessions of a Cuban boy

Author

Eire, Carlos M. N

13) Master of the Senate

Author

Caro, Robert A

14) In the heart of the sea: the tragedy of the whaleship Essex

Author

Philbrick, Nathaniel

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From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye—the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick.
Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history.
In 1820,...

15) Slaves in the family

Author

Ball, Edward

16) American sphinx: the character of Thomas Jefferson

Author

Ellis, Joseph J

17) how we die reflections on lifes final chapter

This entry no longer exists in the catalog

18) The making of the atomic bomb

Author

Rhodes, Richard

19) The path between the seas: the creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

Author

McCullough, David G

20) The Great War and modern memory

Author

Fussell, Paul

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This book is a landmark study about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself. -Pref.