Katherine Boo won the 2012 National Book Award for non-fiction last night for her three-year study on a slum on the outskirts of the Mumbai, India airport.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and local resident Tim Weiner won the National Book Award’s nonfiction category for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A., a sweeping 600-page critical history of the agency with a particular emphasis on the intelligence failures that have occurred during the agency’s relatively short period of existence. “Legacy of Ashes,” writes Weiner, “is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how…

You’d think that, once the Almighty found himself on the business end of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens’ latest broadside, there’d be hell to pay. Instead, Hitchens’ book became an international bestseller, racking up laudatory reviews and garnering an even larger audience for his witty contrarianism. Which makes one suspect that perhaps The Hitch is on to something. As if it needed more attention, yesterday God Is Not Great was named one of five…

MONDAY >> E.L. Doctorow has had a storied career — a National Book Award for 1986’s Ragtime, a pair of film adaptations, and a prestigious position at New York University. Keep this in mind and don’t ask him about whether that story you heard about your Spring Breaking friends getting pulled over in Atlanta and tossed in the clink for joking about General Sherman’s relative velocity is an urban legend or not. He’s just got…