National Book Award long list for nonfiction carries a serious tone

Viet Thanh Nguyen

No memoir, no essay collections, but books on war, poverty, slavery and racism are on the long list this year for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel, "The Sympathizer," is on the list for his book, "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War."

The long list for fiction will be announced tomorrow. The short list will be announced on Oct. 13 and the awards given on Nov. 16.

Here's the nonfiction list:

Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
(Random House/Penguin Random House)

Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Alfred A. Knopf /Penguin Random House) 

Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck 
(Penguin Press/Penguin Random House)

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right 
(The New Press) 

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America 
(Nation Books) 

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War 
(Harvard University Press) 

Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy 
(Crown Publishing Group/Penguin Random House)

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America 
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 

Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition 
(Yale University Press)

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy 
(Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House)