A look at the National Book Awards Finalists / Nonfiction

All the authors vying for this year's National Book Award in nonfiction are finalists for the first time - including the US government. "The 9/11 Commission Report" beat out such critically acclaimed books as "Alexander Hamilton," by Ron Chernow, for a place among the top five. The winner will receive $10,000 at a black-tie ceremony hosted by Garrison Keillor in New York on Nov. 17. To be eligible, a book must have been published in the United States between Dec. 1, 2003, and Nov. 30, 2004, and must have been written by a US citizen. We'll review the nominees in the fiction, young adult, and poetry categories over the next three weeks. - Ron Charles, book editor

Most white Americans know little about the black American experience between the imposition of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War and the Brown v. Board of Education decision that began to unravel these laws in 1954. In "Arc of Justice," Boyle uses a single 1925 court case in Detroit to help fill in that huge blank. Writing with the immediacy of a journalist and the flair of a novelist, he's produced a history that's at once an intense courtroom drama and an engrossing look at race in America. When a black physician, Ossian Sweet, moved his wife and child into a white neighborhood of Detroit, he knew there could be trouble. The early 1920s had seen the lynching of dozens of black men around the country. Sweet had prepared by rounding up 10 black men and several guns inside his home. When a crowd gathered the evening of Sept. 9, 1925, and began to pelt the house with rocks, shots were fired from a second-floor window. On the street below, one man lay dead and another wounded. For Boyle, the People v. Sweet trial symbolized an important shift in white attitudes toward blacks. "Not that racial and ethnic hatred disappeared," he says. 'But they became disreputable, a sign of crudeness, stupidity, and moral failing, a product of the prejudice that ... made men terribly cruel." By Gregory M. Lamb

"No single day in history was more decisive for the creation of the United States than Christmas 1776," James MacPherson writes in an introduction to "Washington's Crossing." Many of us, if we have any sense of Washington crossing the Delaware at Christmas 1776, have only a vague memory of Emmanuel Leutze's painting showing an impossibly overcrowded little boat, in which the commander stands foolishly if heroically erect. This utterly engaging book, combining men on horseback with the larger social context, brings that moment alive. It turns out that that painting was a remarkably good representation of what actually happened. Less than six months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American cause appeared to have collapsed, after a retreat from New York City that was the low point of Washington's career. But in the waning days of the year, he developed a plan to cross the Delaware River into New Jersey and take on the British. His resulting victories at Trenton and Princeton against the finest army in the world and its mercenary allies, the Hessians, put the British on notice that the Americans were a force to be reckoned with - and demonstrated that an "army of liberty," of citizen-soldiers fighting on their own turf in defense of a righteous cause, could defeat an imperial "army of order." By Ruth Walker

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