National Book Critics Circle Award Nonfiction Winners — Complete List (1975–2025)

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  Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao

  2025NBCCNonfiction

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• Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

  2024NBCCNonfiction

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• We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian

  2023NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler

  2022NBCCNonfiction

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  How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

  2021NBCCNonfiction

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• Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner

  2020NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Say Nothing: The True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

  2019NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll

  2018NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald

  2017NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

  2016NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

  2015NBCCNonfiction

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• The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis

  2014NBCCNonfiction

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• Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

  2013NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

  2012NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff

  2011NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

  2010NBCCNonfiction

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• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes

  2009NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

  2008NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

  2007NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

  2006NBCCNonfiction

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• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

  2005NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  2004NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson

  2003NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

  2002NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

  2001NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

  2000NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner

  1999NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

  1998NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

  1997NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban

  1996NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

  1995NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War by Lynn H. Nicholas

  1994NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax

  1993NBCCNonfiction

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• Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

  1992NBCCNonfiction
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  Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

  1991NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele

  1990NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris

  1989NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 by Taylor Branch

  1988NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

  1987NBCCNonfiction

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• Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez

  1986NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas

  1985NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Weapons and Hope by Freeman Dyson

  1984NBCCNonfiction

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• The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour M. Hersh

  1983NBCCNonfiction
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  The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

  1982NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

  1981NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel

  1980NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Munich: The Price of Peace by Telford Taylor

  1979NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Facts of Life by Maureen Howard

  1978NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate

  1977NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

  1976NBCCNonfiction

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• 
  Edith Wharton: A Biography by R. W. B. Lewis

  1975NBCCNonfiction

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