Meet the Finalists for NYPL’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism

Jessica Nordell–Metropolitan Books

Alternate Formats: e-book, e-audiobook

The End of Bias is a transformative, groundbreaking exploration into how we can eradicate unintentional bias and discrimination, the great challenge of our age. 

With nuance, compassion, and ten years' immersion in the topic, Jessica Nordell weaves gripping stories with scientific research to reveal how minds, hearts, and behaviors change. She scrutinizes diversity training, deployed across the land as a corrective but with inconsistent results. She explores what works and why: the diagnostic checklist used by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital that eliminated disparate treatment of men and women; the preschool in Sweden where teachers found ingenious ways to uproot gender stereotyping; the police unit in Oregon where the practice of mindfulness and specialized training has coincided with a startling drop in the use of force.
 

Katie Englehart–St. Martin’s Press

Alternate Format:  e-book 

More states and countries are passing right-to-die laws that allow the sick and suffering to end their lives at pre-planned moments with the help of physicians. But even where these laws exist, they leave many people behind. The Inevitable moves beyond the margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours—far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation. It also shines a light on the people who help them: loved ones and, sometimes, clandestine groups on the internet that together form the “euthanasia underground.”

Andrea Elliott–Penguin Random House

Alternate Formats: e-book, e-audiobook

In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself?

Amelia Pang–Algonquin Books

Alternate Formats: e-book, e-audiobook

In 2012, when Julie Keith opened a package of Halloween decorations she had purchased at a big box store near her home in Oregon, something shocking fell out: an SOS letter, handwritten in broken English by the prisoner who had made and packaged the items. The letter’s author, Sun Yi, was a Chinese engineer turned political prisoner, an ordinary citizen forced into grueling labor for campaigning for the freedom to join a forbidden meditation movement. He was imprisoned alongside petty criminals, civil rights activists, and tens of thousands of others the Chinese government had decided to “reeducate,” carving foam gravestones and stitching clothing for more than fifteen hours a day.

In this page-turning and urgent book, investigative journalist Amelia Pang pulls back the curtain on the human cost of the cheap consumer products Americans take for granted. 

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman–The New Press

Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations.