Lisa Fugard was runner-up for fiction; Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin shared runner-up honors. Brad Kessler took the award for fiction, and Mark Kurlansky for nonfiction. Elie Wiesel received the award for Lifetime Achievement. Click on the honoree’s name for video of acceptance speech, if available.
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Skinner's Drift: A Novel
Lisa Fugard
Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner's Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam.
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Birds in Fall: A Novel
Brad Kessler
One fall night off the coast of a remote island in Nova Scotia, an airplane plummets to the sea as an innkeeper watches from the shore. Miles away in New York City, ornithologist Ana Gathreaux works in a darkened room, full of sparrows, testing their migratory instincts. Soon, Ana will be bound for Trachis Island, along with other relatives of victims who converge on the site of the tragedy.
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Nonviolence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea
Mark Kurlansky
In this timely, highly original, and controversial narrative, author Mark Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power.
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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
One man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: in 1993 Greg Mortenson was an American mountain-climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of a Pakistani village, he promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time--Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. In a region where Americans are often feared and hated, he has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself--at last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools.