The Phi Beta Kappa Society is pleased to announce the fifteen books that make up the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards Short List:
The Christian Gauss Award
Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination, by Vaughn Rasberry
Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism , by Alex Woloch
Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists, by Ross Posnock
A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, by Jerome Charyn
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin
The Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, by Janna Levin
The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Really Works and Why it Matters, by Sean B. Carroll
The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, by Viet Than Nguyen
Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, by Erin L. Thompson
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Mitchell Duneier
The Society will announce the winning titles on October 2, 2017.
The winning authors will be honored at a gala dinner on December 1, 2017 in Washington, DC, at The National Museum of Women in the Arts. Please contact jhorneman@pbk.org if you are interested in attending.
