Faust Book a Contender for National Book Award

This Republic of Suffering, University president Drew Faust’s account of the Civil War’s staggering death toll and how it changed Americans’ view of death, is among the finalists in the nonfiction category for the National Book Award. The full list, released today, is available here; read the New York Times account here. To read excerpts from Faust’s book, see “In My Mind I Am Perplexed”; see also “The Deadliest War.”

Faust’s book is one of five finalists in the category. Another is The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a biography of an American slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson, written by Annette Gordon-Reed, J.D. ’84.

Another alumni author is a finalist in the poetry category: Watching the Spring Festival, by Frank Bidart, A.M. ’67, is on that list.

Joan Wickersham, author of this magazine’s 2007 cover story “Bricks and Politics: What gets built at Harvard, what doesn’t, and why,” was also nominated in the nonfiction category for a memoir, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order.

A winner for each of the four categories—which also include fiction and young people’s literature—will be announced on November 19.