Doctorow’s ‘The March’ Captures Fiction Award

E.L. Doctorow’s “The March,” a sweeping novel of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea during the American Civil War, on Friday won the National Book Critics Circle’s 2005 fiction prize.

The National Book Critics Circle, an organization of book reviewers, also singled out works in biography, memoir, general nonfiction, criticism and poetry. The awards were announced during an evening ceremony at the New School in Manhattan.

Doctorow’s novel explored the impact of Sherman’s march on soldiers and civilians. Other nominees were “Veronica,” by Mary Gaitskill; “Small Island,” by Andrea Levy; “Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro; and “Europe Central,” by William Vollmann.

John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, said Doctorow’s novel “combines the author’s saturnine strengths with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy.... It offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide.”

In biography, the award went to “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

The Boston Globe, in reviewing the book about the man known as the father of the atomic bomb, said “it stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer.”

Other nominees were “Lee Miller: A Life,” by Carolyn Burke; “Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson,” by Jonathan Coe; “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin; and “Mark Twain: A Life,” by Ron Powers.

Svetlana Alexievich won the general nonfiction award for “Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster,” published by the small, nonprofit Dalkey Archive Press. Other nominees were “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East,” by Robert Fisk; “Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild,” by Ellen Meloy; “Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees,” by Caroline Moorehead; and “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” by Anthony Shadid.

The award for autobiography went to Francine du Plessix Gray for “Them: A Memoir of Parents.” Other nominees were “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion; “Fat Girl: A True Story,” by Judith Moore; “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” by Orhan Pamuk; and “Two Lives,” by Vikram Seth.

William Logan, one of America’s best-known poetry critics, won in the criticism category for “The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin,” beating out “Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life,” by Arthur Danto; “Still Looking: Essays on American Art,” by John Updike; “What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles,” by Eliot Weinberger; and “Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South,” by Hal Crowther.

The 2005 award for poetry went to Jack Gilbert for “Refusing Heaven.” Also nominated were “Bent to the Earth,” by Blas Manuel De Luna; “Crush,” by Richard Siken; “The Shout: Selected Poems,” by Simon Armitage; and “The Incentive of the Maggot,” by Ron Slate.