The National Book awards have been given since 1950 in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. They are awarded by the National Book Foundation.

2010
WINNER – Just kids , by Patti Smith
FINALIST – Nothing to envy : ordinary lives in North Korea , by Barbara Demick
FINALIST – Cultures of war : Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq , by John W. Dower
FINALIST – Secret historian : the life and times of Samuel Steward , by Justin Spring
FINALIST – Every man in this village is a liar : an education in war , by Megan K. Stack

2009
WINNER – The first tycoon : the epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt , by T.J. Stiles
FINALIST – Following the water : a hydromancer’s notebook , by David M. Carroll
FINALIST – Remarkable creatures : epic adventures in the search for the origins of species , by Sean B. Carroll
FINALIST – Fordlandia : the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city , by Greg Grandin
FINALIST – The poison king : the life and legend of Mithradates, Rome’s deadliest enemy , by Adrienne Mayor

2008
WINNER – The Hemingses of Monticello : an American family , by Annette Gordon-Reed
FINALIST – This republic of suffering : death and the American Civil War , by Drew Gilpin Faust
FINALIST – The dark side : the inside story of how the War on Terror turned into a war on American ideals , by Jane Mayer
FINALIST – Final salute : a story of unfinished lives , by Jim Sheeler
FINALIST – The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order , by Joan Wickersham

2007
WINNER – Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA , by Tim Weiner
FINALIST – Brother, I’m dying , by Edwidge Danticat
FINALIST – God is not great : how religion poisons everything , by Christopher Hitchens
FINALIST – Unruly Americans and the origins of the Constitution , by Woody Holton
FINALIST – Ralph Ellison : a biography , by Arnold Rampersad

2006
WINNER – The worst hard time : the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl , by Timothy Egan
FINALIST – At Canaan’s edge : America in the King years, 1965-68 , by Taylor Branch
FINALIST – Imperial life in the emerald city : inside Iraq’s green zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
FINALIST – Oracle bones : a journey between China’s past and present, by Peter Hessler
FINALIST – The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

2005
WINNER – The year of magical thinking, by Joan Didion
FINALIST – Out of eden : an odyssey of ecological invasion, by Alan Burdick
FINALIST – Jean-Jacques Rousseau : restless genius, by Leo Damrosch
FINALIST – 102 Minutes : the untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
FINALIST – Bury the chains : prophets and rebels in the fight to free an empire’s slaves, by Adam Hochschild

2004
WINNER – Arc of justice : a saga of race, civil rights, and murder in the Jazz Age , by Kevin Boyle
FINALIST – Washington’s crossing , by David Hackett Fischer
FINALIST – Life on the outside : the prison odyssey of Elaine Bartlett , by Jennifer Gonnerman
FINALIST – Will in the world : how Shakespeare became Shakespeare , by Stephen Greenblatt
FINALIST – The 9/11 Commission report : final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. , by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

2003
WINNER – Waiting for snow in Havana : confessions of a Cuban boy , by Carlose Eire
FINALIST – Gulag : a history , by Anne Applebaum
FINALIST – The big house : a century of life of an American summer home , by George Howe Colt
FINALIST – Lost prophet : the life and times of Bayard Rustin , by John D’Emilio
FINALIST – The devil in the white city : murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed America , by Erik Larson

2002
WINNER – Master of the senate : the years of Lyndon Johnson , by Robert A. Caro
FINALIST – When smoke ran like water : tales of environmental deception and the battle against pollution
, by Devra Davis
FINALIST – The last American man , by Elizabeth Gilbert
FINALIST – Complications : a surgeon’s notes on an imperfect science , by Atul Gawande
FINALIST – Mapping human history: discovering the past through our genes, by Steve Olson

2001
WINNER – The noonday demon: an atlas of depression , by Andrew Solomon
FINALIST – American chica: two worlds, one childhood , by Marie Arana
FINALIST – The lost children of Wilder: the epic struggle to change foster care , by Nina Bernstein
FINALIST – My story as told by water : confessions, Druidic rants, reflections, bird-watchings, fish-stalkings, visions, songs and prayers refracting light, from living rivers, in the age of the industrial dark , by David James Duncan
FINALIST – Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland , by Jan T. Gross

2000
WINNER – In the heart of the sea : the tragedy of the whaleship Essex , by Nathaniel Philbrick
FINALIST – From dawn to decadence : 500 years of Western cultural life, 1500 to the present, by Jacques Barzun
FINALIST – The collaborator : the trial and execution of Robert Brasillach, by Alice Kaplan
FINALIST – W.E.B. Du Bois : the fight for equality and the American century, 1919 – 1963, by David Levering Lewis
FINALIST – Darkness in El Dorado : how scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon, by Patrick Tierney

1999
WINNER – Embracing defeat : Japan in the wake of World War II, by John W. Dower
FINALIST – Woman : an intimate geography, by Natalie Angier
FINALIST – Black Hawk down : a story of modern war, by Mark Bowden
FINALIST – Places left unfinished at the time of the creation, by John Phillip Santos
FINALIST – Secrets of the flesh : a life of Colette , by Judith Thurman

1998
WINNER – Slaves in the family, by Edward Ball
FINALIST – Shakespeare : the invention of the human, by Harold Bloom
FINALIST – There once was a world : a 900-year chronicle of the shtetl of Eishyshok, by Yaffa Eliach
FINALIST – A slant of sun : one child’s courage, by Beth Kephart
FINALIST – All on fire : William Lloyd Garrison and the abolition of slavery , by Henry Mayer

1997
WINNER – American sphinx : the character of Thomas Jefferson, by Joseph Ellis
FINALIST – The kidnapping of Edgardo Montara, by David Kertzer
FINALIST – My brother, by Jamaica Kincaid
FINALIST – The undertaking : life studies from the dismal trade, by Thomas Lynch
FINALIST – Whittaker Chambers , by Sam Tanenhaus

1996
WINNER – An American requiem, by James Carroll
FINALIST – The temple bombing, by Melissa Fay Greene
FINALIST – The living and the dead, by Paul Hendrickson
FINALIST – The life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, by Cary Reich
FINALIST – Fruitful : a real mother in the modern world , by Anne Roiphe

1995

WINNER – The haunted land : facing Europe’s ghosts after communism, by Tina Rosenberg
FINALIST – Salvation on Sand Mountain : snake handling and redemption in southern Appalachia, by Dennis Covington
FINALIST – Darwin’s dangerous idea : evolution and the meanings of life, by Daniel C. Dennett
FINALIST – A civil action, by Jonathan Harr
FINALIST – Ghosts of Mississippi : the murder of Medgar Evers, the trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the haunting of the new South, by Maryanne Vollers

1994
WINNER – How we die : reflections on life’s final chapter, by Sherwin B. Nuland
FINALIST – The unredeemed captive : a family story from early America, by John Demos
FINALIST – Strange justice : the selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson
FINALIST – Fatheralong : a meditation on fathers and sons, race and society, by John Edgar Wideman
FINALIST – In Pharaoh’s army : memories of the lost war, by Tobias Wolff

1993
WINNER – United States: essays: 1952-1992, by Gore Vidal
FINALIST – Land of desire : merchants, power, and the rise of a new American culture, by William Leach
FINALIST – W.E.B. Du Bois : biography of a race, 1868-1919, by David Levering Lewis
FINALIST – Gunfighter nation : the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America, by Richard Slotkin
FINALIST – Battlefield : farming a Civil War battleground, by Peter Svenson

1992

WINNER – Becoming a man : half a life story, by Paul Monette
FINALIST – The promise of the New South : life after Reconstruction , by Edward L. Ayers
FINALIST – Genius : the life and science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick
FINALIST – Truman, by David McCullough
FINALIST – Lincoln at Gettysburg : the words that remade America, by Garry Wills

1991
WINNER – Freedom, by Orlando Patterson
FINALIST – Why American hate politics , by E.J. Dionne, Jr.
FINALIST – Praying for sheetrock : a work of nonfiction, by Melissa Fay Greene
FINALIST – The Jameses : a family narrative, by R.W.B. Lewis
FINALIST – Anne Sexton : a biography, by Diane Wood Middlebrook

1990
WINNER – The house of Morgan : an American banking dynasty and the rise of modern finance, by Ron Chernow
FINALIST – Small victories : the real world of a teacher, her students, and their high school , by Samuel G. Freedom
FINALIST – Richard Milhous Nixon : the rise of an American politician , by Roger Morris
FINALIST – Jackson Pollock : an American saga, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

FINALIST – Righteous pilgrim : the life and times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952, by T.H.Watkins

1989
WINNER – From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman
FINALIST – Parting the waters : America in the King years, 1954-1963, by Taylor Branch
FINALIST – Danger and survival : choices about the bomb in the first fifty years , by McCeorge Bundy
FINALIST – Barbarian sentiments : how the American century ends, by William Pfaff FINALIST – Mother country, by Marilynne Robinson

Categories: Award Winners,Book Buzz,Booklists,Nonfiction