By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," a bleak but determined novel about a community devastated by Hurricane Katrina, has won the National Book Award for fiction.
The National Book Awards ceremony, held just blocks from the Occupy Wall Street protests, was a gilded tribute to the 99 percent.
Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," a bleak but determined novel about a community devastated by Hurricane Katrina, has won the National Book Award for fiction.
Earlier in the week, she told The Associated Press that writing was a way to "ease the looming fact of death."
"I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South," said Ward, whose brother was hit by a drunk driver the year she graduated from college.
