The Book Prize Index

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Charles King

The author prepares a dazzling group portrait of Franz Boas, the founder of cultural anthropology, and his circle of women scientists, who upended American notions of race, gender, and sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s--a sweeping chronicle of how society began to question the basic ways of understanding other cultures and themselves.lves.

Race & EthnicityRace & Ethnicity · medium confidenceRace & Ethnicity81 signalsLlm Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityGoogle Books: HISTORY -> HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryAfrica & the African DiasporaLGBTQ History & LifeBlack History & Culture

Award History

2 wins · 5 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards: Nonfiction2020WinnerOfficial source
Francis Parkman Prize2020WinnerSecondary source
National Book Critics Circle Award for BiographyMajor2019FinalistSecondary source
Plutarch Award: Biography2020FinalistSecondary source
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History2019FinalistSource URL pending
View all award history (5)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Franz Boas84%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    58 / 100 academic

    Trade / academic crossover

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 62%.