All Must Have Prizes

I am delighted to learn that Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, his lively and deeply intelligent study of the pursuit of science in the Romantic era, has been awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. You can read our review of the book, by Dava Sobel, here, and my extended interview with Holmes here.

 

Three other books reviewed on these web pages were also winners:

Autobiography: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill. Reviewed by Anna Mundow.

Biography: Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Reviewed by Maud Newton.

Fiction: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Reviewed by Anna Mundow.

 

Other winners were:

Criticism: Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Bliss.

Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout.

 

Joan Acocella was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

 

-JAMES MUSTICH

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February 11: Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day in 1990. The recent anthology Conversations with Myself samples from decades of archived material in an attempt to "give readers access to the Nelson Mandela…

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Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.