Pulitzer Fever

The 2013 Pulitzer Prizes were announced earlier this week. (April 15 NY Times story is here.) The winner for General Nonfiction is Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King. The publisher's page says this book

is a gripping true story of racism, murder, rape, and the law. It brings to light one of the most dramatic court cases in American history, and offers a rare and revealing portrait of Thurgood Marshall that the world has never seen before.  

As Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns did for the story of America’s black migration, Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove does for this great untold story of American legal history, a dangerous and uncertain case from the days immediately before Brown v. Board of Education in which the young civil rights attorney Marshall risked his life to defend a boy slated for the electric chair—saving him, against all odds, from being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit.

It's in the law library: HV9956.G76 K56 2012 at Classified Stacks.

Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, by John Fabian Witt, was a finalist in the history category. It also won the Bancroft Prize for history. The publisher's page says:

In this pathbreaking and deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the hidden story of the laws of war in the first century of the United States–and of the extraordinary code that emerged from it to change the course of world history. Lincoln’s Code is the haunting and inspiring story of an idea in American history: the idea that conduct in war can be regulated by law. For many, the very idea of a law for war has seemed like an oxymoron. But with sweep and vitality, Witt unfolds the story of the cast of characters who invented the modern laws of war.

Gary J. Bass reviewed Lincoln's Code in the New York Times Book Review Sept. 28, 2012. And you can check out the library's copy: KF7210 .W58 2012 at Classified Stacks.