Thoughts & News

 

2007 National Book Award speech

blog date 11/27/2007

I was the chair of the nonfiction panel for the 2007 National Book Award. This is the speech I gave when I presented the award on November 14:

First of all, thanks to my fellow panelists: Deborah Blum of the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, Caroline Elkins of the History Department at Harvard University, Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Law School, and James Shapiro of the English Department at Columbia University.

Congratulations to the five finalists: Edwidge Danticat, for Brother, I'm Dying, published by Alfred A. Knopf; Christopher Hitchens, for God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, published by Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA; Woody Holton, for Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Arnold Rampersad, for Ralph Ellison: A Biography, published by Alfred A. Knopf; and Tim Weiner, for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, published by Doubleday/Random House.

How did we choose these five books? How did we get along? We got along famously, for the first several months. We made the usual jokes about how we would ever make it up to our respective mail carriers, how the floor boards and ping-pong tables in our houses and apartments groaned under the weight of so many books, what in the world we were going to do with so many tomes. When it came to crunch-time, though, the last couple of months and today, we quarreled, we tussled, we cajoled, we pleaded, we tossed verbal brickbats, we walked out, we walked back in. But so what? To quote the poet, “Writin’ is fightin’.” I’ve never felt more directly and vividly that books matter. And the book that we judged to matter the most—that we thought told us the most about our low, dishonest decade (and the several low, dishonest decades preceding)—the winner of this year’s National Book Award in nonfiction is Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.