American conflicts — from slavery to the Civil War to the war on terror — dominated the non-fiction finalists for the National Book Awards, which were announced on Wednesday.
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, a chronicle of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was joined by Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, a historical account of that war’s massive death toll; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticell An American Family, a biography of the slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson; and Jim Sheeler’s Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the Rocky Mountain News about soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The category was rounded out by Joan Wickersham’s personal memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order.
