Finalist: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China , by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux )
The story of a vast country and society in the grip of transformation, calmly surveyed, smartly reported and portrayed with exacting strokes.
Winners
Prize Winner in General Nonfiction in 2015:
Elizabeth Kolbert
An exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behavior to a world of astonishing diversity.
General Nonfiction
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in General Nonfiction in 2015:
Anand Gopal
A remarkable work of nonfiction storytelling that exposes the cascade of blunders that doomed America's misbegotten intervention in Afghanistan.
The Jury
The Jury
Mark Feeney(Chair )*
arts writer
Deborah Cohen
Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and professor of history
Dan Fagin*
associate professor and director of the science, health and environmental reporting program, Carter Institute of Journalism
Winners in General Nonfiction
Dan Fagin
A book that deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town's cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.
Gilbert King
A richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice in the Florida town of Groveland in 1949, involving four black men falsely accused of rape and drawing a civil rights crusader, and eventual Supreme Court justice, into the legal battle.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.