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Tag: Pulitzer prize

  • The Emperor of All Maladies

    The Emperor of All Maladies, published in 2010, is subtitled A Biography of Cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, began writing it during his fellowship training, prompted by a patient who wanted to know what she was fighting. The book tells the story of the disease and of human attempts to understand and treat it.

    Mukherjee travels from an Egyptian physician's account of a breast tumour and the theories of Hippocrates and Galen to the radical mastectomies of William Halsted, the first childhood leukaemia remissions achieved by Sidney Farber with chemotherapy, the lobbying by Mary Lasker that led to the American war on cancer, the long fight to link smoking with lung cancer, and the discovery of oncogenes that led to targeted drugs such as Gleevec and Herceptin.

    Woven among these histories are the stories of his own patients, which keep the human stakes in view. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2011 and was adapted into a documentary series. It is notable for explaining complex biology clearly while conveying both the progress and the humility the disease demands.

    Book details

    AuthorSiddhartha Mukherjee
    First published2010
    Original languageEnglish
    GenrePopular science
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)570
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 2011

    Themes

    • History of medicine
    • Cancer research
    • Patient experience
    • Chemotherapy and targeted therapy
    • Public health and tobacco

    Who should read it

    Patients, families, medical students and anyone wanting to understand cancer's history and science.

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, starts from a question Jared Diamond says a New Guinean politician named Yali put to him: why did Europeans arrive with so much cargo while New Guineans had so little? Diamond sets out to explain why Eurasian societies, rather than those of the Americas, Africa or Australia, ended up conquering much of the world.

    His answer lies in environment rather than biology. Regions such as the Fertile Crescent happened to have wild plants and large animals suitable for domestication, which allowed food surpluses, dense populations, specialists, states and writing. Eurasia's east-west axis let crops and technology spread across similar climates, and living close to livestock bred diseases that later devastated peoples with no immunity, as in the Spanish conquest of the Incas.

    The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and became one of the most influential works of popular history. Historians and anthropologists have criticised it for environmental determinism and for underplaying human choices and colonial politics. Even so, it reframed how a generation of readers think about inequality between societies.

    Book details

    AuthorJared Diamond
    First published1997
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistory
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)480
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 1998

    Themes

    • Geographic determinism
    • Domestication of plants and animals
    • Epidemic disease
    • Conquest
    • Inequality between societies

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a bold, evidence-packed explanation of why world history unfolded so unequally.

  • Interpreter of Maladies

    Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection gathers nine stories that move between Boston-area suburbs and Calcutta. In the opening story a young couple, estranged after a stillbirth, use nightly power cuts to confess things they have kept from each other. In the title piece, a tour guide who translates patients' symptoms for a doctor is unsettled when an American-born tourist confides a secret to him.

    Other stories follow a Bengali girl in 1971 who watches a family friend from Dhaka follow news of the Bangladesh war, a Calcutta stairwell sweeper whose stories nobody believes, a lonely academic's wife who cannot learn to drive, and a young man settling into a Cambridge rooming house run by a century-old landlady.

    The writing is restrained and exact, and the drama lies in what characters notice and fail to say. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an unusual honour for a first collection, along with the PEN/Hemingway Award, and it is widely taught as a model of the modern short story.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published1999
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)198
    SettingBoston area, New Jersey, Calcutta and Orissa, 1970s to 1990s
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 2000, PEN/Hemingway Award 1999

    Themes

    • Marriage and estrangement
    • Displacement
    • Communication
    • Loneliness
    • Cultural translation

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate subtle, perfectly made short fiction about emotional distance and belonging.

  • The Road

    Some years after an unexplained disaster has destroyed most life on Earth, a man and his young son push a shopping cart along a highway toward the coast, hoping the south will be warmer. The sky is grey with ash, plants and animals are gone, and the few survivors scavenge for canned food or have turned to brutal violence, including cannibalism.

    Neither character is named. The man is ill and determined to protect the boy at any cost, while the boy, born after the catastrophe, clings to the idea that they are the good guys who carry the fire. Their days are a cycle of searching abandoned houses, hiding from roving gangs and talking in brief, tender exchanges as the father teaches survival and tries to preserve his son's humanity.

    McCarthy writes in fragmented, sparse prose with almost no punctuation for dialogue, creating a bleak, hypnotic rhythm. Beneath the horror is one of the most moving portraits of parental love in modern fiction. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, was adapted into a film, and is a landmark of post-apocalyptic literature.

    Book details

    AuthorCormac McCarthy
    First published2006
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)287
    SettingA devastated post-apocalyptic United States, heading toward the southern coast
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007

    Themes

    • Fatherhood
    • Survival
    • Hope
    • Morality amid collapse
    • Love

    Who should read it

    Readers who can handle darkness and want a spare, powerful story about a parent's love.

  • Beloved

    Sethe escaped slavery on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home and now lives at 124 Bluestone Road outside Cincinnati with her teenage daughter Denver. The house is haunted by a furious, grieving presence that has driven away her two sons. When Paul D, another survivor of Sweet Home, turns up after years of wandering, he forces the spirit out and tries to build a life with Sethe.

    Soon afterwards a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears, soaking wet and seemingly from nowhere, and attaches herself to Sethe with an almost ravenous need. Her presence draws long-buried memories to the surface for each member of the household, and the novel slowly pieces together what happened at Sweet Home and in the days after Sethe's escape.

    Morrison drew on the true story of Margaret Garner, who fled slavery in 1856, to write about memory that refuses to stay buried. The narrative is fragmented and poetic, circling events rather than stating them. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and is often named among the greatest American novels; it confronts the psychological legacy of slavery with unflinching intensity.

    Book details

    AuthorToni Morrison
    First published1987
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)324
    SettingOutside Cincinnati, Ohio, 1873, with memories of a Kentucky plantation
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988

    Themes

    • Slavery and its aftermath
    • Motherhood
    • Memory and trauma
    • Haunting
    • Freedom

    Who should read it

    Readers prepared for a demanding, haunting novel about the inner scars slavery left behind.

  • The Grapes of Wrath

    When dust storms and the banks push tenant farmers off the land in Oklahoma, the Joad family loads everything onto a battered truck and joins thousands heading west. Tom Joad, newly paroled from prison, returns home just in time to go with them, along with his resilient mother, his grandparents and a former preacher, Jim Casy, who has lost his faith but not his conscience.

    California turns out to be no promised land. Handbills advertising jobs have drawn far more workers than there is work, wages are pushed down, and migrants are herded into squalid camps and treated with suspicion by locals and police. The family's journey is a steady test of endurance and solidarity, and Ma Joad becomes its moral centre.

    Steinbeck alternates the family narrative with short interchapters that zoom out to the wider exodus, the car salesmen, the roadside diners and the tractors flattening farmhouses. The novel caused outrage when it appeared and was banned in places, but it won the Pulitzer Prize and helped shape national awareness of migrant labour, corporate farming and economic injustice.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1939
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)464
    SettingOklahoma, Route 66 and California's farm valleys, 1930s
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for the Novel 1940, National Book Award 1939

    Themes

    • Poverty
    • Migration
    • Family
    • Labour exploitation
    • Collective solidarity

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a sweeping social novel about hardship, dignity and the human cost of economic collapse.

  • The Old Man and the Sea

    Santiago is an old fisherman in a village near Havana who has gone eighty-four days without catching anything. The other fishermen consider him unlucky, and the parents of Manolin, the boy who once fished with him, have sent the boy to another boat. Manolin still looks after the old man, bringing him food and talking baseball with him.

    On the eighty-fifth day Santiago rows farther out than usual and hooks an enormous marlin that is too strong to haul in. For days the fish tows his small skiff across the open sea while Santiago, his hands cut and cramping, holds the line, talks to himself and to the fish, and thinks about his youth, his strength and the great baseball player Joe DiMaggio.

    Hemingway's style here is pared to the bone, with plain sentences and close physical detail of rope, water, hunger and pain. The novella is often read as a parable about endurance, pride and the dignity of struggle regardless of outcome. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was singled out when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize the following year.

    Book details

    AuthorErnest Hemingway
    First published1952
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)127
    SettingA fishing village near Havana and the Gulf Stream, Cuba
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1953

    Themes

    • Endurance
    • Pride
    • Man versus nature
    • Ageing
    • Friendship across generations

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for a short, intense classic about perseverance, told in famously economical prose.