Each year The New York Public Library shortlists five books for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Started in 1988, the award honors a journalist whose work brings clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies.

This year’s finalists are:

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

Conor Dougherty - Penguin Press

Alternate Formats: E-Book, E-Audio

New York Times journalist Conor Dougherty chronicles America’s housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist movements that have risen in tandem with housing costs.

 

 

 

 

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

Christina Lamb - Simon & Schuster

Alternate Formats: E-Book, E-Audio

Longtime war correspondent Christina Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice.

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It

Tom Philpott - Bloomsbury Publishing

Alternate Formats: E-Book

In Perilous Bounty, veteran journalist and former farmer Tom Philpott explores and exposes the small handful of seed and pesticide corporations, investment funds, and magnates who benefit from the trends that imperil us, with on-the-ground dispatches featuring the scientists documenting the damage and the farmers and activists who are valiantly and inventively pushing back.

 

 

 

Paying the Land

Joe Sacco - Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt & Company

Alternate Formats: E-Book

In Paying the Land, Joe Sacco travels the frozen North to reveal a people in conflict over the costs and benefits of development. The mining boom is only the latest assault on indigenous culture: Sacco recounts the shattering impact of a residential school system that aimed to “remove the Indian from the child;” the destructive process that drove the Dene from the bush into settlements and turned them into wage laborers; the government land claims stacked against the Dene Nation; and their uphill efforts to revive a wounded culture.

 

 

Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law - The New Press

Alternate Formats: E-Book, E-Audio

Prison By Any Other Name explores the shifting and expanding boundaries of America's carceral system and its disproportionate impact on communities of color. Schenwar and Law trace how policy changes billed as progressive reforms—like electronic monitoring and substance misuse treatment facilities—are used as justifications for surveilling and bringing more people into the criminal legal system. They push for a criminal justice approach that focuses on underlying, systemic conditions and moves steadily toward prison abolishment.

 

 

A committee of nine librarians reads dozens of books, all published in 2020, and meets throughout the year to select five finalists. Those choices move on to the six-member committee of journalists, who choose a winner. 

Previous winners of the award, which includes a $15,000 cash prize, include such acclaimed journalists as Jane Mayer, George Packer, Ellen Schultz, David Finkel, Katherine Boo, Dan Fagin, and Anand Giridharadas. In 2020, Rachel Louise Snyder won for her book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, an immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths—that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and, most insidiously, that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence.

The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism was established in 1987 through a gift from Joseph Frank Bernstein, in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein Fealy.
 

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All book descriptions, except Prison by Any Other Name (provided by Meredith Mann), provided by the publishers.

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.