Award Profile
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Amy Bach
Tags Share Amy Bach received the 2010 RFK Book Award for Ordinary Injustice. In Ordinary Injustice, Bach details the everyday failings of the American justice system. Her well-researched and reported work argues that because those affected by the American justice system’s failures tend to be poor or minorities, these individuals are often overlooked, and because…
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Michael Lewis
Tags Share The 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented to Michael Lewis for The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which describes the escalating U.S. housing bubble in the 2000s and subsequent financial crisis of 2007-8. Michael Lewis is an author and financial journalist. Lewis has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair…
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Kathryn Sikkink
Tags Share The 2012 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Winner was presented to Kathryn Sikkink for The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, which forcefully makes the case for the necessity and efficacy of prosecuting international heads of state for human rights violations. Kathryn Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the…
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Michael Honey
Tags Share Acclaimed labor historian Michael Honey received the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign. In this illuminating history, Honey describes the events that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in the last days of his life: the Sanitation Workers’ Strike…
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Karl Jacoby
Tags Share Karl Jacoby received the 2009 RFK Book Award for Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History. In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono Oodham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century…
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Jane Mayer
Tags Share Celebrated journalist Jane Mayer won the 2009 RFK Book Award for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. Mayer, a Washington-based investigative reporter for The New Yorker, chronicles the missteps of top U.S. national security officials in the pursuit of the…
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Dave Eggers
Tags Share Dave Eggers received the 2010 RFK Book Award for Zeitoun. The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy…
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Douglas Brinkley
Tags Share Douglas Brinkley received the 2007 RFK Book Award for The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Based on hundreds of interviews with hurricane survivors, first responders, and elected officials, The Great Deluge recounts the events of Katrina in gripping detail, offering portraits of both everyday heroism and official…
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Taylor Branch
Tags Share Taylor Branch received the 2007 RFK Book Award for At Canaan’s Edge. At Canaan’s Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the…
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John Hope Franklin
Tags Share John Hope Franklin received the 2006 RFK Book Award for his memoir Mirror to America, which recounts his life as an African-American man in the 20th century. Born in 1915, Franklin’s life took him from the indignities of institutional racism (including being threatened with lynching) to chair the University of Chicago’s history department.…
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Nick Kotz
Tags Share Nick Kotz received the 2006 RFK Book Award for Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz offers the first thorough account of the complex working relationship between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. Tracing both leaders’ paths,…
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P.W. Singer
Tags Share P.W. Singer received the 2006 RFK Book Award for Children at War. From U.S. soldiers having to fight children in Afghanistan and Iraq to juvenile terrorists in Sri Lanka to Palestine, the new, younger face of battle is a terrible reality of 21st century warfare. Indeed, the very first American soldier killed by…
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