Special Collections
Pulitzer Prize Award Winners
Description: Bookshare is pleased to offer the following titles, winners of the Pulitzer Prize Award. Note: Some drama winners are available and are listed under Fiction awards. #award
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Lincoln at Gettysburg
by Garry WillsThe power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
by Gordon S. WoodIn a grand and immensely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
by Robert Olen ButlerA collection of stories by the author of The Deuce, Wabash, The Alleys of Eden, and On Distant Ground features tales of the residents of Saigon as they face love, loss, despair, and more.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Truman
by David McculloughThe Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.
The Prize
by Daniel YerginWinner of the Pulitzer Prize and hailed as &“the best history of oil ever written&” by Business Week, Daniel Yergin&’s &“spellbinding…irresistible&” (The New York Times) account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power addresses the ongoing energy crisis. Now with an epilogue that speaks directly to the current energy crisis, The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world&’s most important resource—oil. Daniel Yergin&’s timeless book chronicles the struggle for wealth and power that has surrounded oil for decades and that continues to fuel global rivalries, shake the world economy, and transform the destiny of men and nations. This updated edition categorically proves the unwavering significance of oil throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by tracing economic and political clashes over precious &“black gold.&” With his far-reaching insight and in-depth research, Yergin is uniquely positioned to address the present battle over energy which undoubtedly ranks as one of the most vital issues of our time. The canvas of his narrative history is enormous—from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm, and both the Iraq War and current climate change. The definitive work on the subject of oil, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement, and great value—crucial to our understanding of world politics and the economy today—and tomorrow.
The Fate of Liberty
by Mark E. NeelyOne of America's leading authorities on Lincoln wades straight into this controversy, showing just who was jailed and why, even as he explores the whole range of Lincoln's constitutional policies.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
A Thousand Acres
by Jane SmileyPULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A "powerful and poignant" twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare&’s King Lear (The New York Times Book Review) that takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest daughter objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.&“A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart.... The book has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.&” —The Washington Post Book World
Fortunate Son
by Lewis B. PullerLewis B. Puller, Jr., the son of the most decorated Marine in the Corps' history, volunteered for duty in Vietnam after college. He came home a few months later missing both legs, his left hand, and two fingers of his right hand. He would never walk again, though he would complete law school, serve on President Ford's clemency board, and run for Congress. He would also live with the nightmares of Vietnam, and his growing dependence on alcohol. Few have told their story with more honesty, or more devastating openness.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
A Midwife's Tale
by Laurel Thatcher UlrichPULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.
Rabbit at Rest
by John UpdikeWinner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award In John Updike's fourth and final novel about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired a Florida condo, a second grandchild, and a troubled, overworked heart. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending him mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to return to the world of work. As, through the year of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of the first George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live and opportunities to make peace with a remorselessly accumulating past.
Jackson Pollock
by Gregory W. Smith and Steven W. NaifehBased on family letters and documents, lengthy interviews with his widow, Lee Krasner, as well as his psychologists and psychoanalysts, this book explodes the myths surrounding his death in 1956.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The World Doesn't End
by Charles SimicIn this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.
And Their Children After Them
by Dale Maharidge and Michael Z. WilliamsonThe poignant, real-life multigenerational saga of what happened to three white sharecropper familes in the Depression South, their children and their children's children in the years after they became a symbol of all that was once wrong with the South.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
In Our Image
by Stanley KarnowTraces the history of the Philippines, discusses the influence of Spain and the United States, and looks at the problems facing the Philippines today.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
by Óscar HijuelosIt's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the big arena of New York, where they are workers by day, stars of dance halls by night. Hijuelos's marvelous portrait of the Castillo brothers, their families, their fellow musicians and lovers, their triumphs and tragedies, re-creates the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Machiavelli in Hell
by Sebastian De GraziaIn this intellectual biography, de Grazia presents a new vision of Niccolo Machiavelli that evokes the great Florentine thinker's presence. After giving an engrossing account of Machiavelli's childhood and period of personal crisis that followed his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to an examination of The Prince.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil SheehanOutspoken and fearless, John Paul Vann arrived in Vietnam in 1962, full of confidence in America's might and right to prevail. A Bright Shining Lie reveals the truth about the war in Vietnam as it unfolded before Vann's eyes: the arrogance and professional corruption of the U.S. military system of the 1960s, the incompetence and venality of the South Vietnamese army, the nightmare of death and destruction that began with the arrival of the American forces. Witnessing the arrogance and self-deception firsthand, Vann put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. But by the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. He went to his grave believing that the war had been won.
A haunting and critically acclaimed masterpiece, A Bright Shining Lie is a timeless account of the American experience in Vietnam–a work that is epic in scope, piercing in detail, and told with the keen understanding of a journalist who was actually there. Neil Sheehan' s classic serves as a stunning revelation for all who thought they understood the war.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Winner of the National Book Award
Parting the Waters
by Taylor BranchIn volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement.
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.
Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.
Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Battle Cry of Freedom
by James M. McphersonThe history of the Civil War that brings to life, the generals, the presidents, the soldiers, politicians, Abolitionists, Southern fire-eaters, Northern barn-burners, Copperheads, and Know-Nothings. A volume on the war and its background
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Breathing Lessons
by Anne TylerWINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Evoking Jane Austen, Emma Straub, and other masters of the literary marriage, Breathing Lessons celebrates the small miracles and magic of truly knowing someone.Unfolding over the course of a single emotionally fraught day, this stunning novel encompasses a lifetime of dreams, regrets and reckonings—and is oftern regarded as Tyler's seminal work. Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials and its triumphs—through their quarrels, their routines, and their ability to tolerate each other&’s faults with patience and affection. Where Maggie is quirky, lovable and mischievous, Ira is practical, methodical and mired in reason. What begins as a day trip becomes a revelatory and unexpected journey, as Ira and Maggie rediscover the strength of their bond and the joy of having somebody with whom to share the ride, bumps and all.&“More powerful and moving than anything [Tyler] has done.&” —Los Angeles Times
Oscar Wilde
by Richard EllmannThe biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde - psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award** The definitive history of nuclear weapons—from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—this epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence. From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.
Beloved
by Toni MorrisonUna madre: Sethe, la esclava que mata a su propia hija para salvarla del horror, para que la indignidad del presente no tenga futuro posible. Una hija: Beloved, la niña que desde su nacimiento se alimentó de leche mezclada con sangre, y poco a poco fue perdiendo contacto con la realidad por la voluntad de un cariño demasiado denso. Una experiencia: el crimen como única arma contra el dolor ajeno, el amor como única justificación ante el delito y la muerte comoparadójica salvación ante una vida destinada a la esclavitud. Con este dolor y este amor en apariencia indecibles, Toni Morrison ha construido una soberbia novela que en su día le valió el Premio Pulitzer.