<div><p>Twenty authors attended Wednesday night's National Book Awards ceremony as finalists, each of them selected by a committee of readers made up of poets, novelists, historians, and critics of all stripes. The judges on each of the four committees spent three and a half months reading over a hundred books (the non-fiction judges ...

<div><p>THE DARK SIDE: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW THE WAR ON TERROR TURNED INTO A WAR ON AMERICAN IDEALS By Jane Mayer Doubleday, 392 pages, $27.50 </p><p> </p><p>In the autumn of 2000, I was visiting the United States and watched the televised ...

<div><p>And now NBA nominees for non-fiction: </p><p>Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering (Knopf) Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family(Norton) Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday) Jim Sheeler ...

<div id="subtitle">Peter Matthiessen, Marilynne Robinson among National Book Award finalists</div><div><p>Talk about second chances: Peter Matthiessen, 81, received a National Book Award nomination Wednesday for "Shadow Country," an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s.</p><p>Others ...