2009: "The Dark Side", by Jane Mayer

29th Annual RFK Book Award

Judges: John Seigenthaler, Sr., Kristin Carlson Gore, Judge William Haynes, and Bill Kovach.

Grand Prize Winner: The Dark Side: by Jane Mayer. Click here to order on Amazon.com.

Honorable Mention: Shadows at Dawn: by Karl Jacoby. Click here to order on Amazon.com.

Jane Mayer's The Dark Side wins RFK Book Award

The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights is pleased to announce the selection of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side as the winner of the 2009 Book Award.  Karl Jacoby has been chosen to receive special recognition for Shadows at Dawn.

The 29^th Annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented at a ceremony on Thursday, May 28, 2009 at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a Washington-based investigative reporter for the New Yorker, chronicles the missteps of top U.S. national security officials in the pursuit of the "War on Terror" and their choices, which ultimately not only violated the Constitution, but hampered the pursuit of those who masterminded the 9-11 attacks. Mayer details the decision making process of top administrative officials as they leveraged national sentiment over the September 11 attacks to undermine human rights in the pursuit of unrivaled presidential power.

Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn examines multiple accounts of one of the worst slaughters in the history of the American West, the Camp Grant Massacre.  Jacoby's expansive research analyzes how the events were relayed from four distinct cultural perspectives, giving insight into how each community viewed the violence and chose to revise a dark corner of American history.

"Jane Mayer's The Dark Side explores the core values of our nation's beliefs in justice and humanity - and exposes shocking violations of those values, too long hidden in the shadows.  Both her work and Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn speak to themes that were close to the heart of Robert Kennedy's life and career," said John Seigenthaler, Sr., chair of the RFK Book Awards.