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The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction ($1,000)
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The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction is given for
a distinguished first book of general nonfiction by an American writer.
The PEN/Martha Albrand Awards were created through a bequest from Katrin Lamon, who wrote under the name Martha Albrand.
2005 judges: Dorothy Gallagher, Wendy Gimbel, and Amy Wilentz
Please click here for more information on the award. |
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2005 Awardees
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Presented by Dorothy Gallagher
Winner:
Sam Harris: The End of Faith (W.W. Norton & Co.)
The End of Faith is a necessary and stirring jeremiad that sets forth
with eloquence and logic the rational, scientific, enlightened case
against religious belief. It’s a book that is meant to be controversial
and to open the eyes of its readers. In it, Harris takes issue with
the moderate, politically correct views of secular centrists. Attacking
both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right of the Bush
administration with equal scorn and fervor, he suggests that it’s long
past time for secular moderates to take an extreme attitude toward
believers: What will happen, he asks, when people with 10th-century
beliefs get possession of 21st-century weaponry? Harris analyzes the
world with a humanist’s sympathy, but he has no time for those who
murder and torture in the name of beliefs based on ancient concepts
that are both unbelievable and, more important, unprovable.
This book, with its homely, well-expressed lessons about the
threatening illogic of faith, will be welcomed by people whose reason
has been painfully clouded in recent times by what Harris thinks of as
the dangerous complacency of toleration. An important book that
advances the international debate about the world’s future–about the
kind of world we hope to inhabit in the next century…if there is to
be a next century.
Finalists:
Rachel Cohen: A Chance Meeting (Random House)
A Chance Meeting is as
spellbinding as those long-ago books read by flashlight under the
covers. In a series of linked and re-linked essays, Rachel Cohen has
represented a seminal century in American culture, animating the
artists we call our own as they encounter one another, part, and meet
again. The author has achieved a work solidly grounded in scholarship
and seamlessly imaginative where the record ends. Her identification
with her material is such that her book reads as intimately as a
memoir. She takes the reader with her on a journey of pure pleasure.
Joseph Mazur: Euclid in the Rainforest (Pi Press)
In Euclid and the Rainforest,
Joseph Mazur brilliantly explores the symbiotic relationship between
the physical and the mathematical worlds. He asks the questions: How do
we know that the world is what we experience it to be? Can logic guide
us through the rainforest of science and math and provide us with a
chance to discover the underlying foundations for their truths? In his
highly original search, Mazur is a brilliant forester whose graceful
pursuit leads him to understand the logical bases of human reason.
Mazur has given us a stylish and seductive book that convinces the mind
even as it delights the soul.
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