Do You Teach History? December Spotlight

Congratulations to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, author of Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, who has been selected as the winner of the 2016 Templeton Prize.

Congratulations to Toni Morrison, who has been selected as the winner of the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, which goes to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.

David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) has won the Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize, given by the American Historical Association.

First presented in 1950, the National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards presented by the National Book Foundation, whose mission is “to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” Congratulations to the Random House authors who have been selected as winners in the following categories: poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

Congratulations to Kevin Barry, whose novel Beatlebone has won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize. Established in 2013, the Goldsmiths Prize honors British and Irish writers for “fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form.”

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off

The literary journal Kirkus Reviews has announced the winners for its 2015 book prizes.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara won the fiction category and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates won the prize in nonfiction.

Congratulations to Joan Breton Connelly, whose book, The Parthenon Enigma, has won The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.

Congratulations to Julie Schumacher, who has won the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her epistolary campus novel Dear Committee Members.

Congratulations to Knopf Doubleday authors Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland, and Annie Dillard, author of For the Time Being, who were announced as recipients of the 2014 National Humanities Medal.

Congratulations to Nicholas Epley, who has won the 2015 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science for his book Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.