| Year | Author | Book | |
|---|
| 2008 | Alex Ross | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | |
| 2008 | Allan Brandt | The Cigarette Century | |
| 2008 | Saul Friedländer | The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 | |
| 2007 | Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | |
| 2007 | Pete Earley | Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness | |
| 2007 | Thomas E. Ricks | Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | |
| 2006 | Caroline Elkins | Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya | |
| 2006 | George Packer | The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq | |
| 2006 | Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | |
| 2005 | Luis Alberto Urrea | The Devil's Highway: A True Story | |
| 2005 | Steve Coll | Ghost Wars | |
| 2005 | Suketu Mehta | Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | |
| 2004 | Anne Applebaum | Gulag: A History | |
| 2004 | Dana Priest | The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military | |
| 2004 | Steven Nadler | Rembrandt's Jews | |
| 2003 | Ellen Meloy | The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit | |
| 2003 | Samantha Power | A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide | |
| 2003 | Steven Pinker | The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature | |
| 2002 | Andrew Solomon | The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression | |
| 2002 | David Halberstam | War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals | |
| 2002 | Diane McWhorter | Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution | |
| 2001 | Dave Eggers | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | |
| 2001 | Herbert P. Bix | Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan | |
| 2001 | Ted Conover | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing | |
| 2000 | Brian Greene | The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest forthe Ultimate Theory | |
| 2000 | John W. Dower | Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II | |
| 2000 | Scott Weidensaul | Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds | |
| 1999 | Elliott Currie | Crime and Punishment in America | |
| 1999 | John McPhee | Annals of the Former World | |
| 1999 | Judith Rich Harris | The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do | |
| 1998 | Jared Diamond | Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | |
| 1998 | Jon Krakauer | Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | |
| 1998 | Steven Pinker | How the Mind Works | |
| 1997 | Cynthia Ozick | Fame and Folly | |
| 1997 | Richard Kluger | Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris | |
| 1997 | Samuel G. Freedman | The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt toReagan and Beyond | |
| 1996 | Daniel C. Dennett | Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings of Life | |
| 1996 | Lawrence Weschler | Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder | |
| 1996 | Tina Rosenberg | The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism | |
| 1995 | John Berendt | Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story | |
| 1995 | Jonathan Weiner | The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time | |
| 1995 | Sherwin B. Nuland | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter | |
| 1994 | David Remnick | Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire | |
| 1994 | John Lukacs | The End of the Twentieth Century: And the End of the Modern Age | |
| 1994 | Peter Gay | The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud | |
| 1993 | Anne Matthews | Where the Buffalo Roam | |
| 1993 | Garry Wills | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | |
| 1993 | Richard Rodriguez | Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father | |
| 1993 | Susan Griffin | A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War | |
| 1992 | Andre Dubus | Broken Vessels | |
| 1992 | Daniel Yergin | The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power | |
| 1992 | Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall | Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics | |
| 1991 | Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson | The Ants | |
| 1991 | John McPhee | Looking for a Ship | |
| 1991 | William duBuys and Alex Harris | River of Traps: A Village Life | |
| 1990 | Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson | And Their Children After Them | |
| 1990 | David Fromkin | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 | |
| 1990 | Stephen Jay Gould | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | |
| 1989 | Howard Kohn | The Last Farmer | |
| 1989 | McGeorge Bundy | Danger and Survival | |
| 1989 | Neil Sheehan | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam | |
| 1989 | Timothy Ferris | Coming of Age in the Milky Way | |
| 1988 | Daniel Callahan | Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society | |
| 1988 | James Gleick | Chaos: Making a New Science | |
| 1988 | Richard Rhodes | The Making of the Atomic Bomb | |
| 1987 | Cyra McFadden | Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | |
| 1987 | David K. Shipler | Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land | |
| 1987 | John McPhee | Rising from the Plains | |
| 1986 | J. Anthony Lukas | Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families | |
| 1986 | Joseph Lelyveld | Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White | |
| 1986 | Robert N. Bellah | Habits and the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life | |
| 1985 | Donald Keene | Dawn to the West | |
| 1985 | Jonathan Kwitny | Endless Enemies | |
| 1985 | Studs Terkel | The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two | |
| 1984 | Paul Starr | The Social Transformation Of American Medicine | |
| 1984 | Susan Jacoby | Wild Justice | |
| 1984 | Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer | Conversations With the Enemy | |
| 1983 | Diane Johnson | Terrorists and Novelists | |
| 1983 | Jonathan Schell | The Fate of the Earth | |
| 1983 | Susan Sheehan | Is There No Place On Earth For Me? | |
| 1982 | Diana Trilling | Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor | |
| 1982 | John McPhee | Basin and Range | |
| 1982 | Tracy Kidder | The Soul of A New Machine | |
| 1981 | Carl E. Schorske | Fin-De Siecle Vienna: Politics And Culture | |
| 1981 | Marshall Frady | Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey | |
| 1981 | Maxine Hong Kingston | China Men | |
| 1981 | William Manchester | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War | |
| 1980 | Douglas R. Hofstadter | Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid | |
| 1980 | Lewis Thomas | The Medusa and the Snail | |
| 1980 | Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar | The Madwoman in the Attic | |
| 1979 | Edward O. Wilson | On Human Nature | |
| 1978 | Carl Sagan | The Dragons of Eden | |
| 1977 | William W. Warner | Beautiful Swimmers | |
| 1976 | Robert N. Butler | Why Survive? Being Old In America | |
| 1975 | Annie Dillard | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | |
| 1974 | Ernest Becker | The Denial of Death | |
| 1973 | Frances Fitzgerald | Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam | |
| 1973 | Robert Coles | Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III | |
| 1972 | Barbara W. Tuchman | Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 | |
| 1971 | John Toland | The Rising Sun | |