The Washington Monthly proudly announces the winners of the 2025 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 sixth 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 Christoph Irmscher in CounterPunch, an online journal, for his sensitive and timely review of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press).
In our larger publications category, the top prize goes to Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books, for his illuminating review of I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi (Columbia University Press).
The winners will each receive a $1,000 cash prize.
A panel of five judges—veteran journalists, authors, and reviewers—selected this year’s winners from 70 outstanding submissions published across a range of print and digital outlets in 2024. Winners were honored for their clear and artful exposition, original and persuasive thesis, and ability to enlighten readers with new and valuable information. Judges gave priority to works of public affairs, politics, history, and biography.
“Christoph Irmscher does a masterful job” exploring Arlie Hochschild’s account of the link between white rural Americans’ loss of pride and their support for Donald Trump, said judge Judy Pasternak. “The writing and structure are strong and crystalline. He highlights important facets of the author’s techniques and expands on her ideas. And he brings insights of his own to a subject that couldn’t be more timely or crucial to the continuation of our democracy.” Fellow judge Allen Guelzo agreed, noting the beautiful review was “incisive without being condescending to the subjects of the book. Irmscher seemed to be writing from felt pain, about felt pain. That kind of empathy is in short supply these days.”
In the larger category, the judges praised Johnson’s “exemplary review illuminating a book that unveils the rarely mined life of the Chinese intellectual dissident Liu Xiaobo, charting his strained progress as an embattled dissident leader to his sad death in a remote gulag.” Moreover, judge Steve Braun noted, “Johnson tartly uses his review to criticize American media and fellow book reviewers for not only ignoring Xiaobo’s unheralded role as a dissident leader, , but for their ‘lack of attention paid to the Chinese equivalents’ of previous generations of state-crushed European artists and intellectuals.”
“These winners set a standard that all of us who work in the 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 2025 Kukula Award in the small publications category were:
- David Klion in The Nation, for his review of The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump (Penguin Random House/Portfolio) by Alexander Ward
- Jordan Michael Smith in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, for his review of Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld) by Avi Shlaim
- Benno Weiner in the Los Angeles Review of Books, for his review of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China (Viking) by Edward Wong
- Emily Wilson in The Nation, for her review of Wrong Norma (New Directions) by Anne Carson
Among larger publications, the judges chose these finalists:
- Dan Kois in Slate, for his review of The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider (Penguin Random House/Crown) by Michiko Kakutani
- Carlos Lozada in The New York Times, for his column reviewing Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation) edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves
- Jeremy Lybarger in The New Republic, for his review of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (HarperCollins) by Brad Gooch
- Laura Miller in Slate, for her review of One Way Back (St. Martin’s Press) by Christine Blasey Ford
“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 Glastris. “This year’s winning pieces illuminate many such issues, from the resonance of Donald Trump’s message in rural America to a reevaluation of Joe Biden’s foreign policy achievements; an examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are upending the world as we’ve known it; the courage of China’s unheralded political dissidents; the clash between Zionism and Arab nationalism, in painful personal memoir; and more. This year’s selections also included beautiful reviews about art and poetry. 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,” he added.
ABOUT OUR 2025 JUDGES
Five judges selected this year’s finalists and winners, generously donating their time and invaluable guidance.
- Sara Bhatia is an historian and an independent museum consultant. Her most recent project involved an historic furnishing plan for the National Park Service’s Ford’s Theatre site. A frequent book reviewer for the Washington Monthly, she also writes about museums, history, and culture, and is working on a history of tourism in Washington, D.C.
- Stephen Braun is the co-author of Merchant of Death, a 2007 book profiling the world’s most notorious arms dealer, and a prize-winning former national correspondent and editor with the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. His stories ranged from presidential political coverage to foreign and domestic terrorism to national and international investigative reporting. Before joining AP, Braun worked 25 years at the Los Angeles Times as a national correspondent based in Washington and Chicago and as an editor and reporter in Los Angeles. His investigative reporting after the September 11th attacks was included in a Times entry that won an Overseas Press Club award, and he was among a group of Times reporters whose coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots won a Pulitzer Prize for general reporting. His investigative work also led to an examination of the Taliban’s covert use of Russian-owned aircraft to import weapons and operatives. Merchant of Death, with journalist Douglas Farah, profiled the man who owned those planes – Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Braun has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School, and an invited speaker on many leading media outlets, universities, and think tanks.
- Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where he also directs the Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. His book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion was a New York Times best seller in 2013. From 2006 to 2012, he was a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s American History series, among other popular series. He has written Reconstruction: A Concise History and Robert E. Lee: A Life, which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of Ten Best Books for 2021. His newest books are Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy and the American Experiment, which won the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize, and Voices from Gettysburg: Letters, Papers, and Memoirs from the Greatest Battle of the Civil War. His website is www.allenguelzo.com.
- 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.
- Terence Samuel is a writer and veteran journalist who has written extensively about the changes in American life over the last 40 years. He is the author of the 2010 book The Upper House: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the United States Senate, and his work as a political columnist was anthologized in Best American Political Writing of 2009. Samuel is the former editor-in-chief at USA Today and served as Vice President & Executive Editor at NPR. From 2011 to 2017, he was a politics editor at The Washington Post, overseeing White House and congressional coverage. He began his career as a writing fellow at The Village Voice in New York and later was a reporter at The Roanoke Times & World News, a national correspondent at both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chief congressional correspondent at U.S. News & World Report.
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.
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