Faust’s Book Named Finalist

University President Drew G. Faust’s most recent Civil War book has garnered another award nomination, chosen as a finalist in the non-fiction category for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” Faust’s sixth book, is among five titles that have been selected for the award.

The NBCC Award is the second award for which “This Republic of Suffering” has been nominated. Last year, the book was named a finalist for the National Book Award, though it did not win the title.

Faust, whose field of academic expertise lies in the history of the South during the Civil War and antebellum periods, focuses “This Republic of Suffering” on how Americans struggled to understand and deal with death in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Since it was published in early 2008, the book has earned both critical and popular acclaim. It was billed as “extraordinary” and “profoundly moving” by The New York Times Book Review’s Geoffrey C. Ward. It also sold about 40,000 copies in its first five months in print, the highest circulation of any of Faust’s books to date.

Though the book was not selected for the NBCC’s Winter Good Reads List, it tops the organization’s Good Reads Long List for Nonfiction, published early last February on Critical Mass, the blog of the NBCC Board of Directors.

The NBCC, an organization of over 900 book reviewers and editors from a vast array of American publications, has been giving out awards since 1975. A 24-member Board of Directors is responsible for selecting both the nominees and winners.

The other four finalists for the non-fiction award title are journalists Dexter Filkins—who was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard two years ago—and Jane Mayer; political historian and American University professor Allan J. Lichtman; and University of Kentucky history professor George C. Herring.

The winner will be announced in March in New York City.

—Staff writer Wendy H. Chang can be reached at whchang@fas.harvard.edu.