The Washington Monthly proudly announces the winners of the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing—the only journalism prize dedicated to highlighting and encouraging exemplary reviews of serious, public affairs-focused books. Now in its fifth year, the award honors the memory of Kukula Kapoor Glastris, the magazine’s longtime and beloved books editor.

In our smaller publications category, the winner is Yangyang Cheng in The Nation for her moving and timely review of two books about China and ethnic oppression of the Uyghur population: The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun (Columbia University Press) and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City by Darren Byler (Duke University Press).

In our larger publications category, Helen Lewis of The Atlantic was chosen for her exemplary and clear-eyed review of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company).

The winners will be featured on an episode of C-SPAN’s Book TV program in July and will each receive a $1,000 cash prize.

A panel of seven judges—veteran journalists, editors, authors, and book lovers—selected this year’s winners from some 80 outstanding submissions published in 2023. Winners were honored for their clear and artful exposition, original and persuasive theses, and ability to enlighten readers with new and valuable information. Judges gave priority to works of public affairs, politics, history, and biography.

“Engaging and informative, Cheng’s essay beautifully weaves together discussion of two disparate books,” said Amy Sullivan, a judge and a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, of the first awardee. Steve Braun, a fellow judge, added that the reviewer “neatly describes…two books that deepen the painful portrait of Uyghur life under Communist rule, but at the same time run counterpoint to the notion that the repression is the handiwork only of current Chinese rulers.” The judges agreed that Cheng’s reflections and anecdotes—she was born and raised in China before moving to the United States for graduate school—added pathos to her writing.

In the larger review category, the judges praised Helen Lewis’s “even-handed but devastating… takedown of Michael Lewis’s sympathetic profile” of Sam Bankman-Fried. “This review had the whole package,” said Judy Pasternak, one of the judges. It is “well-structured and engagingly written and adds context that shows how Michael Lewis missed red flags at the time he was researching and writing. [But] the author also looks at the book’s strengths, with a rueful acknowledgment that she’s been a fan of Lewis’s work.” Braun agreed, adding that the review “sets forth her take not only clearly but with a bracing, piercing writing style worthy of Michael Lewis’s own erudite and stylish accounts of business and sports-world iconoclasts and dreamers.” Her review is studded with sparkling sentences “that make it a joy to read.”

“These winners set a standard that all of us who work in this field of serious nonfiction book reviewing should challenge ourselves to meet,” said Paul Glastris, the Washington Monthly’s editor in chief and Kukula’s husband of 31 years.

This year, the judges also selected four exceptional finalists in each Kukula Award category.

Finalists for the 2024 Kukula Award in the small publications category were:

  • Daniel Bessner in The Nation for his erudite review of Liberalism and Its Discontents (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Francis Fukuyama
  • Sanders Isaac Bernstein in Jewish Currents for his timely review of De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century (Restless Books) by Max Czollek
  • Patrick McGinty in The New Inquiry for his thoughtful review of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (University of California Press) by David A. Banks
  • Benno Weiner in the Los Angeles Review of Books for his heart-rending review of Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide (Penguin Press) by Tahir Hamut Izgil and The Backstreets (Columbia University Press) by Perhat Tursun

Among larger publications, the judges chose these finalists:

  • Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic for her passionate review of Madonna: A Rebel Life (Little, Brown and Company) by Mary Gabriel
  • Dan Kois in Slate for his inspired review of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Simon & Schuster) by Taylor Lorenz
  • Jordan Michael Smith in The New Republic for his exceptional review of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine (HarperCollins/Mudlark) by Owen Matthews and The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (W.W. Norton & Company) by Serhii Plokhy
  • Emily Witt in The New Yorker for her masterful review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson

“Nonfiction book reviewing plays a key role in transmitting hard-won reporting, research, and ideas on major issues of the day to policymakers and citizens who can’t possibly read more than a fraction of the important books published each year,” said Paul Glastris.

“This year’s winning pieces illuminate the roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine and China’s oppression of its Uyghur minority; the bloody battle in our own streets fueled by America’s obsession with guns; the spectacular downfall of the world’s youngest billionaire ‘crypto-king’; and timely cultural currents around liberalism and democracy, antisemitism and Jewish identity, and more. No matter the subject, the Kukula Award highlights the work of the talented individuals who practice this undervalued craft—work Kukula devoted herself to publishing,” Glastris added.

ABOUT OUR 2024 JUDGES

Clara Bingham is a journalist and author focused on social justice and women’s issues. Her latest book, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, will be published by Simon & Schuster in July. Her other books include Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, co-authored with Laura Leedy Gansler and adapted into the 2005 feature film North Country. As a Washington correspondent for Newsweek, Bingham covered the George H. W. Bush White House. Her freelance writing has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Ms., Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Talk, and Glamour. She also serves on the Washington Monthly’s editorial advisory board. A 1985 graduate of Harvard University, Bingham lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Stephen Braun is the co-author of Merchant of Death, which profiles the world’s most notorious arms dealer, and a former national correspondent and editor with the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. His stories range from presidential coverage to national and international investigative reporting. Before joining AP, Braun worked for 25 years at the Los Angeles Times as a national correspondent in Washington and Chicago and as an editor and reporter in L.A. His reporting after the September 11 attacks was included in a Times entry that won an Overseas Press Club award, and he was among the Times reporters whose coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots won a Pulitzer Prize. Braun has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School.

Debra Dickerson is an essayist, freelance journalist, and Washington Monthly editorial advisory board member. She focuses on women, social justice, race, class, the military, public policy, and cultural criticism. Dickerson is the author of An American Story and The End of Blackness, and she edited the inaugural edition of Best African American Essays. Her 1996 article in The New Republic, “Who Shot Johnny?”, describing a drive-by shooting that left her nephew paralyzed, was included in that year’s Best American Essays. She lives in Albany, New York.

Judy Pasternak is the author of Yellow Dirt, her acclaimed work about the slow-motion environmental catastrophe in the Navajo Nation set off by uranium mining that fueled the Manhattan Project and Cold War-era nuclear weapons. She was the founding editor of Gartner Business Quarterly and a member of the Los Angeles Times’s national investigations team. Her work has won awards for literary, environmental, and investigative journalism. She has been a juror for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism.

Walter Shapiro is a staff writer at The New Republic, a columnist for Roll Call, a lecturer in political science at Yale, and a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He has been a columnist for USA Today and Esquire and covered politics for Time, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. Shapiro has authored two books—including Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer, about his con-man great-uncle (Blue Rider Press 2016)—and was a White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. He is covering his 12th presidential campaign.

Amy Sullivan has written about politics, religion, and women as a senior editor for national outlets, including Time, National Journal, Yahoo, and the Washington Monthly, where she’s a contributing editor. A Michigan native, Sullivan is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. After over two decades in Washington, D.C., she now lives outside Chicago with her husband and young children.

Amy Waldman is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn. The author of two novels—The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011) and A Door in the Earth (Little, Brown and Company 2019)—Waldman was previously a reporter for The New York Times, including three years as co-chief of the South Asia bureau. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin. She is at work on a nonfiction history of the human relationship with snow. 

ABOUT KUKULA KAPOOR GLASTRIS

The beloved and brilliant books editor of the Washington Monthly, Kukula (“Kuku” to her legions of friends and fans), made the book review section home to some of the magazine’s best thinking and writing. A keen editor and diplomatic manager of writers, she served as den mother and provisioner of delicious late-night home-cooked meals to a generation of young Washington Monthly journalists. “I’ve never met anyone whose combination of personal goodness, plus intellectual and professional abilities, exceeded Kukula’s,” wrote James Fallows in The Atlantic.

To learn more about Kukula’s life, please read Kuku: A Love Story.