The Pulitzer Prize General Nonfiction Winners . 2015 Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. An exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behavior to a world of astonishing diversity. 2014 Dan Fagin Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. A book that deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution. 2013 Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys by Gilbert King. A richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice in the Florida town of Groveland in 1949, involving four black men falsely accused of rape and drawing a civil rights crusader, and eventual Supreme Court justice, into the legal battle. 2012 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. An exploration of a period of human history—the “Renaissance”—that seemed especially devoted to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure. During the Renaissance, people began to move away from supernatural explanations and began, more and more, to see the universe as consisting of matter. 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science. 2010 The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman. A well documented narrative that examines the terrifying doomsday competition between two superpowers and how weapons of mass destruction still imperil humankind. 2009 Slavery by another Name: the Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon. A precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity. 2008 The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer. The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. 2007 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. 2006 Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins. Reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya. 2005 Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. A first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. 2004 Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. A fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost; a re-creation of what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. 2003 "A Problem From Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power. From the Armenian Genocide to the ethnic cleansings of Kosovo and Darfur, modern history is haunted by acts of brutal violence. Yet American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide… shows how decent Americans inside and outside government looked away from mass murder… reveals just what was known and what might have been done while millions perished.. 2002 Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter. A dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. 2001 Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix. A biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito that offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. 2000 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower. An examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II. 1999 Annals of the Former World by John McPhee . 1998 Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond . 1997 Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger . 1996 The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg . 1995 The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time by Jonathan Weiner . 1994 Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire by David Remnick . 1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills . 1992 The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin . 1991 The Ants by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson . 1990 And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson . 1989 A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan . 1988 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes . 1987 Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler . 1986 Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas . 1986 Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White by Joseph Lelyveld . 1985 The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel . 1984 The Social Transformation Of American Medicine by Paul Starr . 1983 Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Sheehan . 1982 The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder . 1981 Fin-De Siecle Vienna: Politics And Culture by Carl E. Schorske . 1980 Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter . 1979 On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson . 1978 The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan . 1977 Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner . 1976 Why Survive? Being Old In America by Robert N. Butler . 1975 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard . 1974 The Denial of Death by the late Ernest Becker . 1973 Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances Fitzgerald . 1973 Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III by Robert Coles . 1972 Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman . 1971 The Rising Sun by John Toland . 1970 Gandhi's Truth by Erik H. Erikson . 1969 The Armies Of The Night by Norman Mailer . 1969 So Human An Animal by Rene Jules Dubos . 1968 Rousseau And Revolution, The Tenth And Concluding Volume Of The Story Of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant . 1967 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis . 1966 Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale . 1965 O Strange New World by Howard Mumford Jones . 1964 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter . 1963 The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman . 1962 The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White Finalists . 2015 No Good Men Among the Living Anand Gopal . 2015 Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China Evan Osnos . 2014 Gary J. Bass The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide Fred Kaplan . 2014 The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War . 2013 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. 2013 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. 2012 One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing by Diane Ackerman. 2012 Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl. 2011 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. 2011 Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne. 2010 How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy. 2010 The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. 2009 Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age by Arthur Herman. 2009 The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcock. 2008 The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt . 2008 The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross . 2007 Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness by Pete Earley . 2007 Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks . 2006 Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt . 2006 The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer . 2005 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta . 2005 The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea . 2004 Rembrandt's Jews by Steven Nadler . 2004 The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military by Dana Priest . 2003 The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker . 2003 The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit by Ellen Meloy . 2002 War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam . 2002 The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon . 2001 Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover . 2001 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers .