Special Collections
Pulitzer Prize Award Winners
Description: Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles, winners of the Pulitzer Prize Award. Note: Some drama winners are available and are listed under Fiction awards. #award
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Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
by Susan SheehanSylvia Frumkin a highly intelligent young girl became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. Susan Sheehan followed Sylvia for almost a year, talking with and observing her.
Slavery by Another Name
by Douglas A. BlackmonIn this groundbreaking historical exposé, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--an "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations--including U. S. Steel--looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery. The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U. S. political system. Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives,Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system's final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II. Slavery by Another Nameis a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Beautiful Swimmers
by William W. WarnerCombines a natural history of the Atlantic blue crab with an historical and ecological study of Chesapeake Bay and a chronicle of the commercial crabber's year.
Pulitzer Prize winner
Why Survive? Being Old in America
by Robert Olen ButlerThe author questions the value of long life for its own sake, arguing that modern medicine has ironically created a group for whom survival is possible but satisfaction elusive. He proposed reforms to redefine and restructure the institutions responsible for the elderly in America.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Gandhi's Truth
by Erik H. EriksonIn this study of Mahatma Gandhi, psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson explores how Gandhi succeeded in mobilizing the Indian people both spiritually and politically as he became the revolutionary innovator of militant non-violence and India became the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience.
Winner of the National Book Award
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Rising Sun
by John TolandThis history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author's words, "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened--muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is "that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history."
Pulitzer Prize Winner
History of the Civil War, 1861-1865
by James Ford RhodesAwarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1917, this volume is widely regarded as the first unbiased history of the Civil War and one of the best single-volume studies. It is remarkable for its scholarly research, objectivity, and engrossing narrative style. "Well worthy of the welcome." -- American Historical Review. Index. Notes. 2 maps. New introduction.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
by Herbert P. BixWinner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone position at the apex of the nation's political hierarchy and as a revered symbol of divine status. Influenced by an unusual combination of the Japanese imperial tradition and a modern scientific worldview, the young emperor gradually evolves into his preeminent role, aligning himself with the growing ultranationalist movement, perpetuating a cult of religious emperor worship, resisting attempts to curb his power, and all the while burnishing his image as a reluctant, passive monarch. Here we see Hirohito as he truly was: a man of strong will and real authority.Supported by a vast array of previously untapped primary documents, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is perhaps most illuminating in lifting the veil on the mythology surrounding the emperor's impact on the world stage. Focusing closely on Hirohito's interactions with his advisers and successive Japanese governments, Bix sheds new light on the causes of the China War in 1937 and the start of the Asia-Pacific War in 1941. And while conventional wisdom has had it that the nation's increasing foreign aggression was driven and maintained not by the emperor but by an elite group of Japanese militarists, the reality, as witnessed here, is quite different. Bix documents in detail the strong, decisive role Hirohito played in wartime operations, from the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 through the attack on Pearl Harbor and ultimately the fateful decision in 1945 to accede to an unconditional surrender. In fact, the emperor stubbornly prolonged the war effort and then used the horrifying bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with the Soviet entrance into the war, as his exit strategy from a no-win situation. From the moment of capitulation, we see how American and Japanese leaders moved to justify the retention of Hirohito as emperor by whitewashing his wartime role and reshaping the historical consciousness of the Japanese people. The key to this strategy was Hirohito's alliance with General MacArthur, who helped him maintain his stature and shed his militaristic image, while MacArthur used the emperor as a figurehead to assist him in converting Japan into a peaceful nation. Their partnership ensured that the emperor's image would loom large over the postwar years and later decades, as Japan began to make its way in the modern age and struggled -- as it still does -- to come to terms with its past.Until the very end of a career that embodied the conflicting aims of Japan's development as a nation, Hirohito remained preoccupied with politics and with his place in history. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan provides the definitive account of his rich life and legacy. Meticulously researched and utterly engaging, this book is proof that the history of twentieth-century Japan cannot be understood apart from the life of its most remarkable and enduring leader.
Move Your Shadow
by Joseph LelyveldThe complexities of South Africa are illuminated upon in this acclaimed work that takes a close, clear look at the strange realities within that country.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Fin-De-Siecle Vienna
by Carl E. SchorskeMagnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born.
Essays and lectures on Austrian politics, government, and intellectual life from 1867 to 1918, with an emphasis on Vienna.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Imperial Reckoning
by Caroline ElkinsAs part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyusome one and a half million people. The system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths was the result of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising. Caroline Elkins spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of survivors of the camps and the British and African loyalists who detained them. The result is an account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya - a pivotal moment in twentieth-century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Fire in the Lake
by Frances FitzgeraldThis landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald's own research and travels, takes us inside Vietnam into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes.
With a clarity and authority unrivaled by any book before it or since, Fire in the Lake shows how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Award
The Dragons of Eden
by Carl SaganDr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared DiamondIn this book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
The Years of Extermination
by Saul Friedländer"Establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews. . . . An account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel. . . . A masterpiece that will endure." — New York Times Book ReviewThe Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedländer's major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of the Holocaust, the most systematic and sustained of modern genocides.The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims' willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise.In this unparalleled work—based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs—the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
by Douglas R. HofstadterThis groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize-winning book sets the standard for interdisciplinary writing, exploring the patterns and symbols in the thinking of mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
Winner of the National Book Award
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Ashes to Ashes
by Richard KlugerNo book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail. Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace. We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers. This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and reduced dosages of tar and nicotine. We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and (b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk. Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market. Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense.
The Prize
by Daniel YerginThe definitive work on the subject of oil, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement, and great value -- crucial to our understanding of world politics and the economy today -- and tomorrow.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie DillardPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley.
Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence."
So Human an Animal
by René DubosIn this collection of stories, the bizarre is rendered normal, the absurd hilarious and the incredible comprehensible. The re-imaginations of reality feature evocations of historical figures, over-televised game show hosts and late-night comedians.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Children of Crisis
by Robert ColesThe notoriety of this book rests on two pretty shaky pillars: first, the initial section of the book is supposed to reveal the effects of segregation and desegregation battles on children, mainly through their drawings, which have become almost iconographic; second, the book was the first major effort to look at segregationists as if they were normal human beings and not vile mutants. But the child studies seem dubious and the novelty of the even handed treatment of white Southerners is more of an indictment of the prevailing intellectual hegemony of the 60's than a recommendation for this book in particular.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Arab and Jew
by David K. ShiplerThe expanded and updated edition of David Shipler's book that examines the relationship, past and present, between Arabs and Jews
In this monumental work, extensively researched and more relevant than ever, David Shipler delves into the origins of the prejudices that exist between Jews and Arabs that have been intensified by war, terrorism, and nationalism.
Focusing on the diverse cultures that exist side by side in Israel and Israeli-controlled territories, Shipler examines the process of indoctrination that begins in schools; he discusses the far-ranging effects of socioeconomic differences, historical conflicts between Islam and Judaism, attitudes about the Holocaust, and much more. And he writes of the people: the Arab woman in love with a Jew, the retired Israeli military officer, the Palestinian guerrilla, the handsome actor whose father is Arab and whose mother is Jewish.
For Shipler, and for all who read this book, their stories and hundreds of others reflect not only the reality of "wounded spirits" but also a glimmer of hope for eventual coexistence in the Promised Land.
Pulitzer Prize winner
The Haunted Land
by Tina RosenbergThe Haunted Land is a look at how four newly democratic eastern European nations are dealing with the memories of forty years of communism. As one official orthodoxy replaces another, the people and governments of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia face ethical dilemmas as complex and wrenching as anything out of Kafka or Orwell. In the greatest moral drama of our time, Communist totalitarianism drew well-intentioned, even idealistic people into horrible crimes. Now, as formerly Communist nations attempt to atone for the past, there is the everpresent temptation to rewrite history to suit the demands of the present. Tina Rosenberg s journalistic triumph is to put a human face on the abstractions of intrigue and betrayal, memory and ideology. The stories in this book take place not just in the highest councils of government and courts of law, but also in smoky pubs and the most private chambers of the soul. The Haunted Land shows how people struggle with their own definitions of guilt as they learn their betrayers were their husbands, fathers, and best friends.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Winner of the National Book Award
The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth KolbertA major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino.
Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard RhodesTwenty-five years after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.
This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.
From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.
Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Winner of the National Book Award