National Book Critics Circle nominees / Nonfiction

To explore the evolution of racial tension in the South, Paul Hendrickson starts with a single photograph of seven Mississippi sheriffs set on keeping a black student from enrolling at the University of Mississippi. The 1962 image, taken just before riots erupted on the campus, centers on sheriff Billy Ferrell: He grins, grips a club, and pretends to strike, a cigarette dangling from his teeth. The photo became a cover of LIFE magazine and an icon of America's civil rights struggle. Hendrickson portrays the men in the photo, and James Meredith, the student who drew them together that day, as multidimensional characters in "the culminating event of civil rights in Mississippi." From exhaustive interviews with the lawmen and their families, neighbors, and peers, Hendrickson pieces together the fear and anger behind the riots at Ole Miss that day and for decades after. And he's open about his own assumptions, calling an Ole Miss sheriff a "bigot" as he talks with an anti-Klan publisher of the '60s. "He was a lot of things," the publisher corrects him, "like any life." "Sons of Mississippi" is part investigative journalism, part philosophy. But its greatest merit is the complexity and nuance of the lives it portrays. By Sara B. Miller

LeBlanc's writing could lift the paint off walls, but this achievement is matched by the patient and compassionate feat of reporting she's achieved in "Random Family." Like a great novel, the closely observed story plants readers in the midst of three generations of extended family in the South Bronx. For more than a decade, LeBlanc followed three teenagers - sister and brother Jessica and Cesar, and Cesar's girlfriend Coco - in and out of prison, in and out of love, in their struggles to care for their children, and in the sometimes fickle embrace of their biological and chosen families. Their lives are constantly on the verge: One wrong move routinely means a boy in prison, a girl pregnant at 15, babies without diapers for a week, a dealer shot, the fridge bare, the phone shut off, an ex-girlfriend kicked out on the street with her kid on her hip in the middle of the night. But in LeBlanc's deft hands, there's nothing sordid or exotic or cloying about either her characters' troubles or their hard-won triumphs. Devastatingly intimate, the book makes them real to readers in a way that proves what good journalism is capable of. By Mary Wiltenburg

Twenty-one years ago, Vollmann traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen. While the trip was a bust - he was a burden, not a help - it sparked a long-standing interest in the morality of violence. Now, after two decades in the field, Vollmann has made his thoughts public with this seven-volume study published by McSweeney's, Dave Eggers' publishing company. Using the conflicts of the past decade, during which America shifted from the cold war to the war on terror, the book examines whether violence is ever justifiable. In his research, Vollmann visited hot spots across the globe, from Cambodia to Burma, Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia to Yemen, Yugoslavia, and Colombia. The list of sources the book draws upon is equally astounding - from Cicero to the King of Sparta. While Vollmann's writing sparkles, it is the voice of survivors that make this such a haunting read. Many are crushed and scoured by the weight of war, such as one Serbian woman whose boyfriend was butchered by Croats: "No one has a chance to open my heart again," she says. By John Freeman

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