(This award is offered every other year, in odd-numbered years.)
2007 James Carroll, House of War (Mariner Books)
Runners-Up:
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Knopf)
Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (The Penguin Press)
2009 Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (Penguin Group)
Runners-Up:
Jeffrey Meyers, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Basic Books)
Stanley Plumly, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (W.W. Norton & Co.)
2011 Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (Picador)
Runners-Up:
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq (W.W. Norton)
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House)
2013 Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House)
Runner-up:
Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck (Penguin Books)
2015 Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (Crown)
2017 Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown/Penguin Random House)