The nonfiction books favored by the National Book Critics Circle are usually heavy. Last year's winner was "A Problem From Hell," Samantha Power's searching examination of 20th-century genocide. But this year includes a finalist that gives a whole new meaning to the label "heavy." William Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down" weighs in at 3,298 pages in seven volumes. McSweeney's, the small publishing house run by superhip David Eggers in San Francisco, finally agreed to take on the project that New York houses had turned down for four years. Mr. Eggers, who published an excerpt of Vollmann's work in his magazine five years ago, assembled a staff of volunteers to fact check and copy edit the thousands of pages involved. Will the NBCC's imprimatur help sell the 3,500 print run? Possibly. What's clearer, though, is that it will whet readers' appetite for the radically reduced but still enormous 900-page edition coming out later this year from Ecco (a division of HarperCollins).

If you're interested in an even more abbreviated version than that, come to the free NBCC reading on March 3, the night before the 30th-anniversary awards ceremony at the New School in New York City. All 25 finalists in five categories are invited to read from their nominated books for just a few minutes each. Most of them come, the famous and the newbies, and it's far and away the year's most enjoyable night of literary talk.

Why did Fletcher Christian toss his captain, William Bligh, into a tiny boat and take command of the British ship "Bounty"? The question has launched a thousand novels, poems, plays, and Hollywood movies. The popularity of the tale hangs on contrasting the cruelty of Bligh with the humanity and virtue of the aptly named Mr. Christian. Alexander suggests that, as usual, real history is less crystalline, painted in shades of gray. A combustible mix of Bligh's abuses (probably only verbal and not excessive for the time), a longing for the departed pleasures of Tahiti, strong drink, and a rash decision set in motion momentous events. That Bligh and the loyalists in his crew managed to sail a 23-foot open boat across 3,618 miles of ocean in 1789 remains one of the great seafaring feats of all time. Less known is his later service to the British Navy, in war and peace, in which he seemed able to shrug off his undeserved reputation as a tyrant. Stories brought back from Pitcairn Island by passing ships depicted a pious Christian utopia, a successful miniexperiment in the effects of British civilization. But Alexander suggests that the Tahitian women brought there were more sex slaves than wives. She explodes the mutiny myth and pieces together a picture with many facets, a fine fractured mirror reflecting many points of view. By Gregory M. Lamb

This fast-paced book by a Washington Post columnist helps fill a yawning gap in 20th-century history. It chronicles a massive atrocity that compares to the Jewish Holocaust: the network of prison labor camps across the Soviet Union that led to the deaths of millions of innocent people for simply political reasons, and lasted nearly seven decades. While Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago," which was published in the 1970s, gives an insider's view of the camps, Ms. Applebaum was able to take advantage of the post-Soviet opening of the archives in Moscow and of many personal memoirs to compile a sweeping history of a system that was both a tool of state terror and an economic source of slave labor. She tries to draw some similarities between the Soviet gulag and Nazi concentration camps, while graphically telling how the misguided Communists (as in North Korea today) used the labor camps for perverse social engineering and political suppression. The camps varied in their severity, but served to isolate anyone whom Soviet leaders considered to be an "enemy of the state." Death was most often due to neglect or cold, although executions were common. The book is a testament to both the survivors and victims of a totalitarian system, perfected under Josef Stalin, that few Russians today care to learn about. By Clayton Jones

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