NBCC Honored as Winners Named
By Francine Fialkoff -- Library Journal, 4/1/2008
Junot Díaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, took the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards ceremony March 6 in New York City. The group's other wide-ranging winners included Tim Jeal's revisionist biography, Stanley (Yale Univ.), Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf), and Harriet Washington's grim nonfiction account of medical experiments on black Americans, Medical Apartheid (Doubleday). Mary Jo Bank was given the poetry prize for Elegy (Graywolf) and Alex Ross for criticism for The Rest Is Noise (Farrar), on 20th-century music and culture.
Because the awards are given by the critics themselves, they have particular cachet. In accepting his award, Ross thanked the reviewers, who took his book “from oblivion” to “glittering semi-obscurity.”
The NBCC also honored Emilie Buchwald, writer, founder, and longtime publisher of Milkweed Editions, with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and New York magazine reviewer Sam Anderson with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Earlier in the week, the NBCC itself was honored by the Association of American Publishers for its role in leading the fight to save newspaper review sections nationwide and in spurring dialog about books and reading.
