The New York Public Library Selects Five Finalists for the 38th Annual Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

Media Assets

February 5, 2025—The New York Public Library has announced the five finalists for its 38th annual Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Bernstein Award recognizes works written by working journalists that raise awareness about current events or issues of global or national significance.

The nominees this year are covering urgent and important topics that affect society worldwide, including the fight over a natural gas pipeline on the Atlantic Coast, a future projection of how climate change will affect the U.S., the scramble to mine for the metals that power our technology, an examination of how systemic racism and racial bias affects human health, and the battle happening in classrooms to ban books, rewrite curricula, limit rights for minority and LGBTQ students.

This year’s finalists are:  

• Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future by Jonathan Mingle (Island Press)
• On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser (Riverhead Books)
• Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Sick by Layal Liverpool (Astra House)
• They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner Books)

All books nominated were published in 2024 and were selected by an 11-person Library Review Committee, which read over 100 books submitted by publishers. The six-member Bernstein selection committee, which is composed of professional journalists, will announce the winner in May. The winner will receive a $15,000 cash prize. Previous winners of the award include Patricia Evangelista, who won last year for her book Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Penguin Random House), journalists Ben Rawlence, Jill Leovy, Katherine Boo, Charlie Savage, and Dan Fagin. 

The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism was established in 1987 through a gift from Joseph Frank Bernstein in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein Fealy. The award honors journalists and their important role in raising public awareness of current issues, events, or policies. 

Additional information about the finalists:

• Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America's Energy Future by Jonathan Mingle (Island Press)

  Gaslight is the story of an epic, six-year battle between one of the country’s most powerful energy companies and the everyday people who stood in the path of its massive fossil gas pipeline. On one side, an archetypal Goliath: a corporation that commands billions of dollars and unparalleled influence over state politicians and federal government agencies alike. On the other, a diverse band of Davids: lawyers and farmers, conservationists and conservatives, innkeepers and lobbyists, scientists, and nurses. Their struggle took them all the way to the Supreme Court, but their larger fight was in the court of public opinion. Would the nation swallow the industry’s narrative that gas was “a bridge fuel” to a clean, green future? Or would the public recognize it as a methane bomb, capable of not only wrecking local communities but imperiling the planet? Vivid and suspenseful, Gaslight is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the urgent stakes of the energy choices we face today.

  Jonathan Mingle is an independent journalist. He has written about the science and politics of climate change, energy, technology, public health, and other subjects for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Undark Magazine, Yale Environment 360, Slate, The Boston Globe, and other outlets. He is a recipient of the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. As a 2020 APF fellow, he reported on the political, legal, and grassroots battles over new natural gas (aka methane) infrastructure, and its local impacts and global climate consequences. His first book is Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World.

• On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  
  Humanity is on the precipice of a great climate migration, and Americans will not be spared. Tens of millions of people are likely to be driven from the places they call home. Poorer communities will be left behind, while growth will surge in the cities and regions most attractive to climate refugees. America will be changed utterly. Abrahm Lustgarten’s On the Move is the definitive account of what this massive population shift might look like. As he shows, the U.S. will be rendered unrecognizable by four unstoppable forces: wildfires in the West; frequent flooding in coastal regions; extreme heat and humidity in the South; and droughts that will make farming all but impossible across much of the nation.

  Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter writing about climate change at ProPublica and for The New York Times. His writing also appears in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Scientific American. His series on drought in the American West was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and his investigation into the oil industry was the subject of the Emmy nominated Frontline documentary The Spill. His other books include Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster and China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser (Riverhead Books)
  
  In Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, award-winning journalist Vince Beiser chronicles the destructive side effects that the global hunt for critical metals has on our so-called clean energy transition, from environmental damage to political upheaval to murder. He exposes how rivers are being poisoned and rainforests bulldozed to acquire the resources needed to power our wind turbines and build our smart phones. As Beiser writes: “Our future depends, in a literal sense, on metal. We need a lot of it to stave off climate change, the most dangerous threat of all.” Captivating and startling, Power Metal is the first book to fully capture how the metals needed to sustain our technology-reliant world and stave off climate change are producing extraordinary consequences. As demand for lithium, cobalt, copper, and other critical metals surge, people in all corners of the globe are racing for new places and approaches to locate and extract them.
  
  Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author. His first book, The World in a Grain, was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a California Book Award. His work has appeared in Wired, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The New York Times, among other publications. He lives with his family in Vancouver, British Columbia.
   
• Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Sick by Layal Liverpool (Astra House)
  
  Layal Liverpool spent years as a teen bouncing from doctor to doctor, each one failing to diagnose her dermatological complaint. Just when she’d grown used to the idea that she had an extremely rare and untreatable skin condition, one dermatologist, after a quick exam, told her that she had a classic (and common) case of eczema and explained that it often appears differently on darker skin. Her experience stuck with her, making her wonder whether other medical conditions might be going undiagnosed in darker-skinned people and whether racism could, in fact, make people sick. The pandemic taught us that diseases like Covid disproportionately affect people of color. Here, Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism. In Systemic, Liverpool shares her journey to show how racism, woven into our societies, as well as into the structures of medicine and science, is harmful to our health.
   
  Layal Liverpool is a science journalist with expertise in biomedical science, particularly virology and immunology. Her PhD research at Oxford focused on investigating how invading viruses are detected by the body’s immune system. She writes news, features and opinion articles about the latest scientific research, from technology and space, to health and the environment. Her writing has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Wired and the Guardian. Currently, she is an independent journalist. 
   
• They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner Books)
  
  The urgent, revelatory story of how a school board win for the conservative right in one Texas suburb inspired a Christian nationalist campaign now threatening to undermine public education in America—from an NBC investigative reporter and co-creator of the Peabody Award–winning and Pulitzer Prize finalist Southlake podcast. Award-winning journalist Mike Hixenbaugh delivers the immersive and eye-opening story of Southlake, Texas, a district that seemed to offer everything parents would want for their children—small classes, dedicated teachers, financial resources, a track record of academic success, and school spirit in abundance. All this, until a series of racist incidents became public, a plan to promote inclusiveness was proposed in response—and a coordinated, well-funded conservative backlash erupted, lighting the fire of a national movement on the verge of changing the face of public schools across the country.
  
  Mike Hixenbaugh, senior investigative reporter for NBC News, has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won a Peabody Award for his reporting on the battle over race, gender, and sexuality in American classrooms. They Came for the Schools, his first book, is the winner of the prestigious Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Hixenbaugh’s work at newspapers in Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas has uncovered deadly failures in the U.S. military, abuses in the child welfare system, and safety lapses at major hospitals. He lives in Maryland with his wife and four children.
   

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