Runner-up for fiction during the Prize’s inaugural year was Kevin Haworth; for nonfiction, Adam Hochschild (who went on to win the nonfiction award in 2012). Fiction winner this year was Francine Prose; nonfiction winner was Stephen Walker. Studs Terkel received the award for Lifetime Achievement. No video of acceptance speeches is available for 2006.
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The Discontinuity of Small Things: A Novel
Kevin Haworth
This quiet story of the Holocaust chronicles the lives of several Danes through the summer of 1943. It is the discontinuity of small things--the scattered inconveniences, chance meetings, glimpses of injustice, and indulgences of hope,--that haphazardly directs each individual to his fate. An hypnotic story of ordinary people caught in a silent maelstrom, ultimately driven to extraordinary feats.
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Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
Adam Hochschild
An account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London's smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah Wedgwood; and the House of Commons had passed the first law banning the slave trade. The activists brought slavery in the British Empire to an end in the 1830s, long before it died in the United States.
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A Changed Man
Francine Prose
What is charismatic Holocaust survivor Meyer Maslow to think when a rough-looking young neo-Nazi named Vincent Nolan walks into the Manhattan office of Maslow's human rights foundation and declares that he wants to "save guys like me from becoming guys like me"? As Vincent gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do this, he also transforms those around him: Meyer Maslow, who fears heroism has become a desk job; the foundation's dedicated fund-raiser, Bonnie Kalen, an appealingly vulnerable divorced single mother; and even Bonnie's teenage son.
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Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima
Stephen Walker
On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, the first atomic bomb detonated as expected, resulting in nearly 100,000 deaths. The Japanese surrendered nine days later. But if the bombing of Hiroshima represents one of the signal events of the twentieth century--indeed, in the history of mankind--at the time it was but another episode in an unprecedented drama whose final act had begun three weeks earlier, at the secret laboratory in Los Alamos. This book is the story of those three weeks, as seen through the eyes of the pilots, victims, scientists, and world leaders at the center of the drama. Interviews with American and Japanese witnesses tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima--including the copilot, who writes a minute-by-minute diary on board the Enola Gay; the atomic scientist who arms the bomb in midair with a screwdriver; and the Japanese student desperately searching for his lover in the ruins of the city.
