Book Prizes Awarded With Nod to History

(NYTimes) - Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a sweeping, prodigiously researched biography of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson.
... In the fiction category, Peter Matthiessen won for “Shadow Country,” a one-volume compilation of three previously released but revised and condensed novels based on the life of Edgar J. Watson, a 19th century ruthless cane farmer in Florida who was said to be a serial killer. Continued