 Thernstrom's first book, "Whose Votes Count?Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights", won four awards, including the American Bar Association's Certificate of Merit, and the Anisfield-Wolf prize for the best book on race and ethnicity and the Benchmark Book Award from the Center for Judicial Studies.Along with her husband, she also won the 2004 Peter Shaw Memorial Award given by the National Association of Scholars.