Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction


1962
The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore H. White

1963
The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman

1964
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter

1965
O Strange New World, Howard Mumford Jones

1966
Wandering Through Winter, Edwin Way Teale

1967
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, David Brion Davis

1968
Rousseau and Revolution, Will and Ariel Durant

1969
So Human an Animal, Rene Jules Dubos; The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer

1970
Gandhi's Truth, Erik H. Erikson

1971
The Rising Sun, John Toland

1972
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945, Barbara W. Tuchman

1973
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Frances FitzGerald; Children of Crisis (Vols. 1 and 2), Robert M. Coles

1974
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

1975
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

1976
Why Survive? Being Old in America, Robert N. Butler

1977
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, William W. Warner

1978
The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan

1979
On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson

1980
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter

1981
Fin-de–Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl E. Schorske

1982
The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder

1983
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, Susan Sheehan

1984
Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr

1985
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel

1986
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, Joseph Lelyveld; Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, J. Anthony Lukas

1987
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, David K. Shipler

1988
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

1989
A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan

1990
And Their Children After Them, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson

1991
The Ants, Bert Holldobler and Edward O.
Wilson

1992
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, Daniel Yergin

1993
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Garry Wills

1994
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remick

1995
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner

1996
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, Tina Rosenberg

1997
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, Richard Kluger

1998
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond

1999
Annals of the Former World, John McPhee

2000
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower

2001
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix

2002
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, Diane McWhorter

2003
“A Problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power

2004
Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum

2005
Ghost Wars, Steve Coll

2005
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, Caroline Elkins

What's with gulags?

can't wait for the movies to come out.

I'd like to read a few of these. I ordered Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I'd also like to check out “A Problem from Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide, and Annals of the Former World.

A few of those books are great. Guns, Germs and Steel is incredible. But a few of them, such as the Lincoln book, are rediculously stupid. I'm also pretty sure that being a huge fan of Lincoln and writing an entire book about the address is like loving the Beatles and writing an entire book about the song A Day in the Life. The song is great, but it doesn't need an entire book devoted to it. And it's not all that the Beatles were.

A Problem from Hell:

Amazon.com
During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," she writes in this impressive book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Annals of the Former World:

In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

McPhee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is his ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example, the processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so by allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot they are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

i actually have a book about dylan's song "like a rolling stone" (a former girlfriend gave it to me cuz she knew i am a big dylan fan).

http://www.amazon.com/Like-Rolling-Ston ... F8&s=books

it's ok, but a little much even for me.

I'm sure Vacate would love this

what exactly is the criteria for a nobel prize in nonfiction?

i would think out of all the different categories available it would be near impossible to say one is better than the other

Can you get the fiction list?

haha, i've read that one too. to be fair, the author did sidetrack into other related issues of the times, but yeah, one book devoted to just one song is kinda a bit much. i mostly read it bc i was curious to see how one could write for so long about such a seemingly narrow topic.

oh pish, everyone knows you can't read

Pulitzer.

ugh, i knew something was wrong with the way i was reading that...can i blame that post on being tired?

Writing about gulags apparently helps tremendously.

look, youre the fucking mod, the king shit, the don corleone around here, youre supposed to oversee shit like my post never happens

Guns, Germs & Steel is an amazing book.

Has anyone read The Making of the President? I ordered it today.