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E.L. Doctorow's Civil War novel "The March" won the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards announced Friday in New York.
The biography award was given to "American Prometheus," about atomic pioneer J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Francine du Plessix Gray's "Them," subtitled "A Memoir of Parents," was honored for autobiography.
Jack Gilbert ("Refusing Heaven") won poetry laurels. "The Undiscovered Country" by William Logan, a writer once called "the pit bull of mainstream poetry reviewers," won for criticism. The non-fiction award went to "Voices From Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich.
In addition to Doctorow's story about Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas, fiction nominees included William T. Vollmann's 800-page-plus "Europe Central," which had won the National Book Award, and Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," a novel about the moral implications of cloning.
Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," was among the nominees for biography, along with Carolyn Burke's "Lee Miller"; Jonathan Coe's "Like a Fiery Elephant" and Ron Powers' "Mark Twain."
John Updike, a two-time NBCC winner for fiction, was a finalist in the criticism category, nominated for "Still Looking: Essays on American Art." Other finalists were "Unnatural Wonders," by the esteemed art critic Arthur Danto; North Carolinian Hal Crowther's "Gather at the River"; and Eliot Weinberger's "What Happened Here."
Also Friday, the Critics Circle presented its lifetime achievement award to Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press in Wainscot, N.Y., and editor of the annual Pushcart Prize anthology.
Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle is a not-for-profit organization of book editors and critics with some 600 members nationwide.
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
