2009 Pulitzer Prize Books At MnSCU Libraries
The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners and nominated finalists were announced last week. A complete list can be viewed at http://www.pulitzer.org.
The prize for fiction went to Elizabeth Strout’s novel “Olive Kittredge,” which is available at Concordia. Publishers Weekly wrote: “Thirteen linked tales from Strout (“Abide with Me,” etc.) present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. . . . the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout.
Lynn Nottage’s drama, “Ruined,” was awarded the prize for drama. “Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.” It is not yet in any MnSCU library.
Annette Gordon-Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” takes this year’s prize for history. You can read more about it at http://www.amazon.com/Hemingses-Monticello-American-Family/dp/0393064778/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240255363&sr=8-1 and you can get it from Concordia.
Concordia is also where you’ll find a copy of this year’s winner for biography, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” by John Meacham. Publishers Weekly notes that Meacham brings “a writer’s flair and the ability to relate his story without the incrustations of ideology and position taking that often disfigure more scholarly studies of Jackson.”
This year’s prize for poetry went to W. S. Merwin’s “Shadow of Sirius,” “among Merwin’s best poems” writes Publishers Weekly. It is available through interlibrary loan.
What the Livingston Lord Library CAN provide direct and easy access to is the 2009 prize-winner for general non-fiction, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II” by Douglas A. Blackmon. Again, Publishers Weekly: “Blackmon’s book reveals in devastating detail the legal and commercial forces that created this neoslavery along with deeply moving and totally appalling personal testimonies of survivors. Every incident in this book is true, he writes; one wishes it were not so.” You can find it at E185.2 .B545 2008.
Finally, the prize for music was awarded to Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet”. Should the library budget recover in a meaningful way, you’ll be able to get the score here shortly afterwards.
–from Larry Schwartz, MSUM Librarian