Shane Harris (’98), author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State,” was named the winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism by the New York Public Library this week.

Harris is featured in the Summer 2011 issue of Wake Forest Magazine in “Spy Talk” and in a Deacon Blog post regarding renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Bernstein Book Award was established by the library in 1987 in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein Fealy. Previous winners have included Lawrence Wright, George Packer, Keith Bradsher, Elaine Sciolino, Philip Gourevitch and David Remnick, among others.

The finalists were:

The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, by Shane Harris (Penguin Press).

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, by Eliza Griswold (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux).

Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma, by Emma Larkin (Penguin Press).

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (Portfolio/Penguin).

The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply, by Marie-Monique Robin (The New York Press).