Faust Nominated for National Book Award

University President Drew G. Faust’s latest civil war book was named a finalist yesterday for the 2008 National Book Award in non-fiction.

“This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” is one of five books nominated in that category by the National Book Foundation, the non-profit literary foundation that gives out the awards.

The winner will be announced next month in New York City.

Faust’s sixth book takes on how Americans managed and understood death during the Civil War, her area of scholarly expertise.

Published early last year—just months after Faust assumed the Harvard presidency—the book garnered largely positive reviews and impressive sales for a historical work.

In its first five months in print, Faust’s book sold close to 40,000 copies according to data from Nielsen BookScan. Her most high-profile book before this year—Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War—generated some controversy among Civil War historians when it was published in 1997, but has sold under 10,000 copies since it was first printed.

Notable past winners of the non-fiction title include Rachel Carson, George F. Kennan, Gore Vidal, and Thomas L. Friedman.

The other finalists were Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Rutgers and New York Law School, journalists Jane Meyer and Jim Sheeler, and Cambridge resident Joan Wickersham.

Faust has said in past interviews that “This Republic of Suffering” will likely be her last book for the foreseeable future, as she does not plan to write while serving as Harvard’s president.