André Bernard Speaks at PBK Book Awards Dinner Dec. 4, 2009

Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards are given each year in December for outstanding scholarly works published in the United States. The winning books, drawn from the fields of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics, must be of broad interest and accessible to the general reader.

André Bernard, vice president and secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, was the keynote speaker at the 2009 awards ceremony. In this video, he gives an overview of his speech prior to the event.

This year, Peter Trachtenberg received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown and Company, 2008).

Christopher Benfey received the Christian Gauss Award for A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade (The Penguin Press, 2009).

And Harold Varmus received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science for The Art and Politics
of Science (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2009).

The Society presented the awards on Friday, December 4, at The Metropolitan Club of Washington, D.C. Each awardee received a $10,000 prize.

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Education

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• André Bernard
• Phi Beta Kappa
• PBK
• Book Awards