Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

Follow

• 

  Unsheltered

  Barbara Kingsolver

  How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family's one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town's powerful men. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future

• 

  Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands

  Barbara Kingsolver and Annie Griffiths

  From the tallgrass prairies of Kansas to the Alaskan tundra and the desert Southwest, a dedicated novelist and conservationist teams up with an acclaimed photographer to capture America's endangered virgin lands and wilderness, examining the spirit and beauty of these diverse landscapes and offering a determined call for their preservation.

• 

  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

  Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp

  Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

• 

  Freedom of the High School Press

  Nicholas D. Kristof

• 

  The Japanese Economy at the Millennium: Correspondents' Insightful Views

  Nicholas D. Kristof

• 

  A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity

  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  Equal in urgency and compassion to Half the Sky, this galvanizing new book from the acclaimed husband-and-wife team is even more ambitious in scale: nothing less than a deep examination of people who are making the world a better place, and the myriad ways we can support them, whether with a donation of five dollars or five million, an inkling to help or a useful skill to deploy. With scrupulous research and on-the-ground reporting, the authors assay the art and science of giving-determining the current most successful local and global aid initiatives (on issues from education to inner-city violence to disease prevention), evaluating the efficiency and impact of specific approaches and charities, as well as fund-raising. Most compellingly, perhaps, they show us how particular people have made a difference, and offer practical advice on how best each of us can give and what we can personally derive from doing so.

• 

  China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power

  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  The definitive book on China's uneasy transformation into an economic and political superpower by two Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporters. An insightful and thought-provoking analysis of daily life in China, China Wakes is an exemplary work of reportage.

• 

  Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  Two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world. They show that a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad and that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential.

• 

  Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia

  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  The recent economic crisis in Asia heaped devastation upon millions. Yet Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn argue that it was the best thing that could have happened to Asia. It destroyed the cronyism, protectionism, and government regulation that had been crippling Asian business for decades, and it left in its wake a vast region of resilient and determined millions poised to wrest economic, diplomatic and military power from the West.

• 

  Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

  Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. Taken together, these accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

• 

  The Guinness Book of Ireland

  Bernard Loughlin and Colm Tóibín

  Six writers - Bernard Loughlin, Colm Toibin, Michael Finlan, Rosita Boland, George O'Brien and Sean Dunne - have combined to produce a book which offers both a guide to the sites and sights of Ireland, and a collection of photographs of its monuments and moods

• 

  Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems

  N. Scott Momaday

  "The oral tradition of the American Indian is very important to me, and it has informed much of my writing. The poem, in the strict sense of the word, does not exist in that tradition, but song and story are indispensable and highly developed. Both are infused with poetic character. Moreover, the song in oral tradition is invested with a belief in the intrinsic power of language. That power is definitive, and it informs the best of poems. My Kiowa father sang and told stories to me from the Kiowa oral tradition from the time I was a young child. That tradition has been largely influential in the determination of my literary voice. My mother, who was predominately English, was a writer, and she gave me a deep love of, and respect for, the English language."--Preface.

• 

  Angle of Geese and Other Poems

  N. Scott Momaday

• 

  Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story

  N. Scott Momaday

  A mute Indian child has an extraordinary experience one Christmas when, following a figure who seems to be his beloved dead grandfather, he becomes part of a circle in which he, animals, nature, and all the world join in a moment of peace and good will.

• 

  Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems

  N. Scott Momaday

  This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday’s mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday’s connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape.The title poem, “The Death of Sitting Bear” is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. “I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination,” Momaday writes, “and I sing him an honor song.” Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest.

• 

  Four Arrows & Magpie: A Kiowa Story

  N. Scott Momaday

  Through the eyes of two Kiowa children, young readers will learn the beauty and danger of a world almost forgotten. The mythic legend of how the Kiowa Indians first arrived in Oklahoma will awaken children to the richness of the state's Indian heritage. Illustrated with sketches almost poetic in their simplicity and paintings that echo the power and precision of his prose, this book reminds us all how deeply the past and the present are intertwined.

• 

  House Made of Dawn

  N. Scott Momaday

  A young American Indian returning from World War II searches for his place on his old reservation and in urban society.

• 

  In the Bear's House

  N. Scott Momaday

  N. Scott Momaday's unique connection to the beauty and spirituality of the natural world surfaces in all of his works, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn to his more recent collection In the Presence of the Sun. Yet In the Bear's House is Momaday's intensely personal quest to understand the spirit of the wilderness embodied in the animal image of Bear. Intimately linked to Bear since his childhood, Momaday searches for this elusive yet omnipresent spirit who is both the keeper and the manifestation of the wild mountains, rivers, and plains. Exploring themes of anguish, forgiveness, and belief, Momaday journeys from the bitter Siberian taiga to the blackening night sky to deep within his own timeless essence, and reveals Bear to be both a radiant presence and spiritual restorative.

• 

  In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems

  N. Scott Momaday

  "In the Presence of the Sun presents 30 years of selected works by [N. Scott] Momaday, the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ('forms of the earth') to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision."--Library Journal

• 

  The Ancient Child

  N. Scott Momaday

  N. Scott Momaday shapes the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear into a timeless American classic. The Ancient Childjuxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend into a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel--the story of Locke Setman, known as Set, a Native American raised far from the reservation by his adoptive father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, is drawn irresistibly to the fabled bear-boy. When he meets Grey, a beautiful young medicine woman with a visionary gift, his world is turned upside down. Here is a magical saga of one man's tormented search for his identity--a quintessential American novel, and a great one.

• 

  The Gourd Dancer

  N. Scott Momaday

  Momaday draws on various traditions and influences, especially Native American oral tradition, in poems that shift between nature and society, past and present, actuality and legend.

• 

  The Journey of Tai-me

  N. Scott Momaday

  Following the death of his beloved Kiowa grandmother, Aho, in 1963 Momaday set out on his quest to learn and document the Kiowa heritage, stories, and folklore. His Kiowa-speaking father, artist Al Momaday, served as translator when Scott visited tribal elders to ask about their memories and stories. Scott gathered these stories into The Journey of Tai-me.

• 

  The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages

  N. Scott Momaday

  Exploring such themes as land, language, and identity, Momaday recalls the moving stories of his Kiowa grandfather and Kiowa ancestors, recollects a boyhood spent partly at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, and ponders the circumstances of history and Indian-White relations as we inherit them today. Collecting thirty-two essays and articles, The Man Made of Words attempts to fashion a definition of American literature as we have not interpreted it before and explores a greater understanding of the relationship between humankind and the physical world we inhabit.

• 

  The Names: A Memoir

  N. Scott Momaday

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist recalls the significant events and ventures of his own life, his own land, and his own people, recreating his experiences as an American Indian and those of his relatives

• 

  The Way to Rainy Mountain

  N. Scott Momaday

  Author presents the experience of journeying with him into his explorations of himself, his people and his heritage.