The results are in!

Last night in New York City the National Book Awards were announced. Colum McCann won the award for fiction for Let the Great World Spin, a novel set in New York City in 1974, with a large cast of characters whose lives are touched by the mysterious tightrope walker who crosses a wire suspended between the Twin Towers. The award for non-fiction was given to T. J. Stiles for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a biography of that Gilded Age entrepreneur who built a vast steamship and railroad line. There also was an award for young people's literature, won by Philip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, an account of the civil rights champion who at age 15 was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, nine months before Rosa Parks' famous refusal.