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Critics Circle Awards Surprise Winners
John F. Baker -- 3/20/00
With the exception of the late Argentinean critic Jorge Luis Borges, whose award was posthumous, all the winners at the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony in New York, held March 13, expressed amazement at their success. The ceremony, a brisk and well-organized affair, presented a series of designated critics to announce the winners, the choice of whom had been debated until within an hour of the announcements; the winners thus had no time to prepare any remarks, and their responses were brief.
Jonathan Weiner, who won in the General Nonfiction category for Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf), said the book had taken him nearly five years of work and thanked his editor, Jonathan Segal, for his confidence and patience.
The award for Criticism to Borges, for his Selected Non-Fictions (Viking), was accepted by the editor of the work, Eliot Weinberger, who, admitting he was "speechless--meaning without a speech," paid graceful tribute to the other winners and nominees as having all shared interests with the protean Argentinean. (A number of attendees, while acknowledging Borges's eminence, said later that they would have preferred the awards to be made only to living writers.)
The winning p t was a sprightly 84-year-old, Ruth Stone, for Ordinary Words from tiny Paris Press. She was, she said, "overwhelmed" but grateful for an award from people intent on "saving the world."
Henry Wiencek won in the Biography category for his The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's), another astonished recipient who spoke of the cooperation he had received from members of the family of both races, and of the patience of editor Robert Weil (now at Norton) and agent Howard Morhaim.
The Fiction winner, Jonathan Lethem, whose quirky Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday) became an independent bookseller handselling favorite, said he was "thrilled and flattered" by the "intimidating company" of the other nominees.
The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to freelance critic Benjamin Schwartz, who writes for the Atlantic Monthly and Los Angeles Times, among others. Critic Linda Wolfe paid tribute to the late Putnam editor Faith Sale. The Ivan Sandrof Awards for Distinguished Achievement went, in absentia, to people who, while not book critics, had made a major contribution to the culture: film critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, and San Francisco publisher, bookseller and p t Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
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