A look at the National Book Critics Circle nominees - Nonfiction

After Milosevic murdered the Muslims; Hutu Power hacked up the Tutsis; Hussein gassed the Kurds; Pol Pot butchered the Cambodians; Hitler slaughtered the Jews; and Talaat massacred the Armenians, Powers writes, Americans shook their heads and wondered how their country could have failed to intervene to stop such crimes. The devastating conclusion of her masterful book is: America didn't fail; it meant to look the other way. During each genocide (even before international law established that name), the US had sufficient evidence to understand that a people and its culture were being systematically destroyed. In almost every case, a US representative on the ground tried - and was personally devastated by his failure - to draw governmental attention to the impending slaughter. In every instance, the US could have chosen to intervene, diplomatically or militarily, in time to save millions. And in every case, the government ignored, and often even suppressed, the information it received. In all of 20th-century American politics, no unwritten policy was so faithfully adhered to. And why? Because, Power posits, politicians do not believe they will be held to account for the things they fail to do. In this sweeping study, she makes a powerful case that if the world is to survive, they must. (574 pp.) By Mary Wiltenburg

One day, while still a boy, Richard Rodriguez scraped a razor blade across his skin to see if he "could get the brown out." Several decades later, he still considers his color an impurity - only now he perceives it to be, instead of a shade darker than some White Anglo-Saxon ideal, the hue most quintessentially American. In "Brown," Rodriguez expertly extracts, from his own past as well as that of his nation, the lessons we can learn about race in the United States from the growing Hispanic population. "I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end of ancient wanderings," he writes with his unsurpassed eloquence. "Even so, the terrorist and the skinhead dream in solitude of purity and of the straight line because they fear a future that does not isolate them." Rodriguez rightly argues that such preoccupation with blood - the myopia of so many Americans who see nothing between the extremes of black and white - has preserved mutual hatred and lately inspired renewed segregation. A mixture of what he calls "the founding palette" (black, white, and red), brown is the color of a homemade remedy that may be the only antidote to our racially fraught history. (232 pp.) By Jonathon Keats

Billed as a "Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life," Wood's debut full-length book takes readers on a meandering tour of man's 18th- and 19th-century fascination with animating the inanimate. Serious readers, beware: This is not a history of robotics research. Instead, in five exhaustively researched chapters, Wood spins a superficial tale of philosophical and theological anxiety while dusting off the stories of a number of quirky automatons and the "magicians" who designed them. We learn of Jacques de Vaucanson's android creations, the defecating duck and mechanized flute player. Then Wood reveals the great hoax behind a mechanical chess player and Thomas Edison's little-known efforts to commercialize a mechanical doll. The last two chapters discuss the early days of cinematography and circus dwarves and constitute Wood's feeble attempt to reverse her theme and comment on the mechanization of man by society. An approachable book for a nontechnical audience, "Edison's Eve" is unfortunately verbose in the wrong spots and offers only brief commentary on the shared concerns of today's robotics researchers and their ancestors. Indeed, Wood seems more interested in dropping nuggets of trivia than in digesting her meaty theme. (269 pp.) By Helana Kadyszewski

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