by Kelly Pickerill
This year’s Pulitzer prizes were awarded today! Congrats to the winners!
Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press) won for fiction; the judges called it “a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”
Definitely a surprise win, Harding’s novel was published by a small, non-profit publisher affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine. It originally sold 15,000 copies. It’s now in paperback, but Bellevue plans on reprinting the hardcover.
The last time a small publisher’s book won the Pulitzer for fiction was in 1981, when Louisiana University Press’s A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole won.
For history, the winner was Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin).
In the Sunday NYT Book Review, Joe Nocera reviewed Ahamed’s book about the four bankers who effectively triggered the Great Depression but ultimately transformed the United States into the powerful financial leader it is today, calling it “a grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, describing a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.”
For biography, the winner was a book that’s been on my radar for some time now, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Knopf). I’ve always been fascinated by Vanderbilt’s life, how in a pre-financial-regulation America he made the rules up as he went along, ending up one of the richest, most influential men of the 19th century.
The Pulitzer judges called Stiles’s book “a penetrating portrait of a complex, self-made titan who revolutionized transportation, amassed vast wealth and shaped the economic world in ways still felt today” (Pulitzer.org).
The winner for poetry was Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press).
I’d never read any of Armantrout’s poems before today, but after picking up a copy of Versed and reading a poem here and there I have to say I really like it. I went through an E. E. Cummings-obsessed phase in early high school — I loved the way his poems were a physical picture of their content. Armantrout’s poetry affects me in a similar way — her imagery is furthered by the style of her poems, which are by turns whimsically simple and existentially weighty.
And for general nonfiction, the winner was The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday).
“In the first full account of how the arms race finally ended, The Dead Hand provides an unprecedented look at the inner motives and secret decisions of each side. Drawing on top-secret documents from deep inside the Kremlin, memoirs, and interviews in both Russia and the United States, David E. Hoffman introduces the scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies who saw the world sliding toward disaster and tells the gripping story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and many others struggled to bring the madness to an end. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the danger continued, and the United States began a race against time to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states” (thedeadhandbook.com).
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