Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee offers a "biography" of cancer, written in a style that has been described as a form of literary thriller with a disease as protagonist.
Finalists for the prize for general nonfiction: “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain,” by Nicholas Carr and “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by S.C. Gwynne.