NBCC Book Award Finalists

The National Book Critics Circle (of which I am a member) has announced its book award finalists for 2009. Very few of the books that I nominated managed to make the cut. I'm ok with that in most fields, such as poetry (where I did nominate Louise Gluck) and even in fiction (I simply cannot believe, however, that any of those five books was as good as, never mind better than, Colum McCann's Let the Brave World Spin). But I have a real hard time with some of the nonfiction selections, and particularly with some of the works of history that were ignored over those that were chosen. (Springing to mind immediately is Gordon Woods' Empire of Liberty, or Pat Sullivan's book on the NAACP, or Robert Norrell's Up From History -- and this is without even looking at my shelves and reminding myself of some of the great new books I have read this year.)