Best Books of the Year
Menu

Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard · award year

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Project 2009

The 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Project went to The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer (J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize) and Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook (Mark Lynton History Prize). 7 books were finalists across 2 categories.

Winners

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

  1. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayersource (opens in a new tab)

Mark Lynton History Prize

  1. Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brooksource (opens in a new tab)

Finalists

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

  1. Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene by Masha Gessensource (opens in a new tab)
  2. The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11 by Edward Aldensource (opens in a new tab)

Mark Lynton History Prize

  1. The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcocksource (opens in a new tab)
  2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reedsource (opens in a new tab)
  3. The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire by Joe Jacksonsource (opens in a new tab)

About the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Project

Covers two book categories of the Lukas Prize Project, 2006-2025: the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. The Work-in-Progress awards are skipped because they fund unfinished books. Year is the award year named in each announcement (books published the previous calendar year). Levels are Winner and Finalist as named in the announcements; 2019 had two Lynton winners (Delbanco and Stewart). Pre-announcement shortlists, published in some recent years, are not included. Sources are the Nieman Foundation's yearly press releases linked from its Lukas Prize page; journalism.columbia.edu/lukas returns 403 to scripts. Nieman has no 2007 release, and archive.org was offline, so 2007 uses Legal History Blog's verbatim repost of Columbia's 2007 announcement. The summary table on the Nieman Lukas page has errors (wrong titles for 2020 and 2025, a duplicated 2023 row), so the per-year releases were used instead. Titles printed in capitals in the releases are given in title case. Spelling fixes from the releases: Siddhartha Mukherjee (release: Siddartha), Melissa Fay Greene (blog: Faye), Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (release: 'in His Laboratory'). The Looming Tower uses the published spelling Al-Qaeda (announcement: Al Quaeda).

Organization: Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Years are award years, which can differ from publication years. Official site (opens in a new tab)

The most recommended books of 2009

Shares the most books with