National Book Critics Circle Award — Nonfiction

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

  2024NBCCNonfiction
• 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
• 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
• 
  Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll

  2018NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald

  2017NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

  2016NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

  2015NBCCNonfiction
• The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis

  2014NBCCNonfiction
• Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

  2013NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

  2012NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff

  2011NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

  2010NBCCNonfiction
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes

  2009NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

  2008NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

  2007NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama

  2006NBCCNonfiction
• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

  2005NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  2004NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson

  2003NBCCNonfiction
• 
  A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

  2002NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

  2001NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

  2000NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner

  1999NBCCNonfiction
• 
  We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

  1998NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

  1997NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban

  1996NBCCNonfiction
• 
  A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

  1995NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War by Lynn H. Nicholas

  1994NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax

  1993NBCCNonfiction
• Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

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

  1991NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele

  1990NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris

  1989NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 by Taylor Branch

  1988NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

  1987NBCCNonfiction
• Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez

  1986NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas

  1985NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Weapons and Hope by Freeman Dyson

  1984NBCCNonfiction
• The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour M. Hersh

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

  1982NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

  1981NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel

  1980NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Munich: The Price of Peace by Telford Taylor

  1979NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Facts of Life by Maureen Howard

  1978NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate

  1977NBCCNonfiction
• 
  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

  1976NBCCNonfiction
• 
  Edith Wharton: A Biography by R. W. B. Lewis

  1975NBCCNonfiction