Pulitzer Prize-winning books for 2021
From the New York Times, May 9, 2022
FICTION
‘The Netanyahus,’ by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books)
Cohen’s book imagines Benzion Netanyahu, academic and father of the Israeli prime minister, arriving to interview for a job at a fictional New York college (modeled on Cornell) in the late 1950s. The book is narrated by Ruben Blum, a faculty member asked to consider Netanyahu’s fitness for the job. The novel explores themes of Jewishness and diaspora as Netanyahu’s fatalistic view of Jewish history bumps up against that of Blum, an assimilated American Jewish professor. In The New York Times Book Review, Taffy Brodesser-Akner called it “a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.”
HISTORY
‘Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America,’ by Nicole Eustace (Liveright)
Also a finalist for the National Book Award, this account shows the lasting consequences of the 1722 killing of an Indigenous hunter in Pennsylvania by two white traders. Eustace, a professor at New York University, explores how the case’s immediate aftermath ushered in a fierce debate about justice, contrasting the Indigenous perspective and its focus on reconciliation and forgiveness with that of the white colonists, who often favored retribution. Ultimately, the episode — and the ensuing cross-cultural negotiation between Indigenous communities and white colonists — helped pave the way for a treaty still recognized today.Image
‘Cuba: An American History,’ by Ada Ferrer (Scribner)
This sweeping account of Cuba shared the award for history. It spans 500 years — from before Christopher Columbus’s arrival to after the death of Fidel Castro — and details its history of occupation, revolution and more. More than a history of Cuba, Ferrer writes, “this book is also a history of Cuba in relation to the United States, a history of the sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive, always uneven relationship between the two countries.” Ferrer has spent decades researching Cuba and draws on her own family’s history, allowing readers to “see their own country refracted through the eyes of another.”
Blog Author’s Own Note–The above book is the only one of the winners I have read. My interest in Cuba arose after I read a novel set in Cuba. Those of us raised in the 60’s really need to read Cuba; An American History. It’s another example of ‘things we never learned in high school.’
BIOGRAPHY
‘Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South,’ by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly. (Bloomsbury)
The artist Winfred Rembert didn’t start drawing and painting seriously until he was in his 50s. In his memoir, which blends his life story with his artwork — vivid-hued paintings carved into leather — Rembert recounts scenes from his life in the Jim Crow-era Deep South. Rembert describes how he survived a near lynching in 1960s Georgia, when he was chased by a white mob after a Civil Rights demonstration that turned chaotic. He was later jailed for stealing a car, and spent seven years in prison, forced to work on chain gangs. Rembert died in the spring of 2021, shortly before the release of the memoir, which was a collaboration with Erin I. Kelly, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In the introduction, he described how he had wanted to tell his life story for decades, but didn’t think there was an audience: “I was worried about whether people would believe me or care.”
GENERAL NONFICTION
‘Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City,’ by Andrea Elliott (Random House)
In “Invisible Child,” Elliott expands on her 2013 series for The Times about Dasani, a homeless New York schoolgirl, and her family. An intimately reported portrait of the family, it’s also a searing account of poverty and addiction, and of the city and country’s repeated failures to address those issues. On the Book Review’s podcast, Elliott said that Dasani became the main focus of the book, in part, because “she was somebody who, at a very young age, could articulate in a moving and profound way her experience. And that’s a rare trait even in adults.” In his review, Matthew Desmond wrote: “The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful work whose stories will live inside you long after you’ve read them.”