The New York Public Library Announces Five Finalists For Its Annual Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism

March 5, 2019 - The New York Public Library has named five nonfiction books finalists in the 32nd annual Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Honoring working journalists whose books bring clarity and public attention to important issues, events or policies, the 2019 Bernstein Award finalists' works cover topics such as the Flint water crisis, American prison system, and the Syrian conflict.

The books, all published last year, were selected by a nine-member Library Review Committee, which received and read just over 100 nominations from publishers. A six-member Bernstein Selection Committee, chaired by veteran journalist and editor Jim Hoge, will choose a winner; their decision will be announced at an awards reception on April 16th at the Library's iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

This year's finalists and their works are:

  • No Turning Backby Rania Abouzeid;  Based on more than five years of fearless, clandestine reporting, No Turning Back brings readers deep inside Bashar al-Assad’s prisons, to covert meetings where foreign states and organizations manipulated the rebels, and to the highest levels of Islamic militancy and the formation of the Islamic State. No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict through the dramatic stories of four young people seeking safety and freedom in a shattered country.

  • American Prison by Shane Bauer; In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War.

  • The Poisoned Cityby Anna Clark; In the first full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision-making. Places like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

  • Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold; Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, Griswold reveals what happens when an imperiled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice. Amity and Prosperity tells the story of the energy boom’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist, pursuing her case in court and beginning to expose the damage that's being done to the land that her family has lived on for centuries.

  • Dopesick by Beth Macy; Fully charting the opioid crisis in America, Dopesick is an unforgettable portrait of the families and first responders on the front lines. Macy takes the reader into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.

Previous winners of the award, which includes a $15,000 cash prize, include such acclaimed journalists as George Packer, Ellen Schultz, David Finkel, Katherine Boo, Dan Fagin, and Anand Giridharadas. In 2018, Masha Gessen won for her revelatory work, The Future Is History, which captures a pivotal era through the stories of several Russians whose lives spanned three decades in which Russia, having seemingly shed its Soviet incarnation for good and embarked on a journey toward democracy, devolved into a frightening retro-totalitarian state

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 gift was in two parts and also endows the position of the Helen Bernstein Librarian for Periodicals & Journals. This position curates The New York Public Library’s internationally renowned Periodicals Division, housing one of the largest collections of past and present newspapers, magazines, and journals from around the world. The position is currently held by Librarian Shannon Keller.

PRESS CONTACT

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