Lukas Prize Project
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Entry title: Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town (PublicAffairs)
Awarded: 2006, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
“Tulia is a classic expose of justice denied in small town America, written with meticulous documentation and dramatic flair,” judges noted. “A chilling account of racially-biased drug enforcement in the Texas panhandle, Tulia opens in July 1999 with a police sweep that apprehended 47 alleged cocaine dealers, nearly all of them black. Blakeslee reveals how the suspects were arrested and convicted solely on the word of an undercover cop so unfit for law enforcement that he was wanted for a crime in another Texas town. The assembly-line legal system—controlled by an obstinate sheriff and a cynical judge—churned out prison sentences as severe as 361 years. Almost miraculously set right by a determined coalition of local citizens and pro-bono attorneys, these prosecutions ultimately led to state legislative reforms.”
Honorable Mention
Judges also noted two finalists: Kurt Eichenwald for Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story (Broadway Books), and co-authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Alfred A. Knopf). Judges noted that “Conspiracy of Fools recreates the culture of complicity that inflated and finally exploded Enron…a forensic investigation of corporate behavior uninhibited by the constraints of legal, regulatory, and moral accountability.” About American Prometheus, judges said, “Offers not only a vivid psychological portrait of its subject, but also a richly-textured history of the atom bomb’s creation and the post-war era of anti-communist hysteria.”
Jurors
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Book prize were: Joe Conason, John Darnton, and Elizabeth Kolbert.
Entry title: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin)
Awarded: 2006, The Mark Lynton History Prize
“Through their elegantly entwined biographies,” the judges noted, “Megan Marshall takes us into the life of family, intellectual innovation, gender relations, and even health in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century…Megan Marshall’s interweaving of domestic life and the wider world of American culture, reform and experimental thought is accomplished with the observant eye of the best social history and the nuance of a Jane Austen novel.”
Honorable Mention
Judges also noted one finalist: Tony Judt for Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. In Postwar, Judt has drawn on 40 years of reading and writing about modern Europe to create a fully rounded, deep account of the continent’s recent past.
Jurors
Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize were: Robert Harms, Louis Masur and Natalie Zemon Davis.
Entry title: Emily Post and the Rise of Practical Feminism (to be published by Random House)
Awarded: 2006
“Laura Claridge thinks and writes about Emily Post in a way Tony Lukas would have cheered, producing the kind of rigorous and imaginative cultural history that he both pioneered and championed.” Claridge’s book is “a fresh look at the deeply influential advice-giver who showed that manners were about ethics, not just etiquette, and who in the process helped advance the democratic promise that made America special among nations: that anyone could rise into the middle class and beyond.”
Honorable Mention
Judges also noted two finalists: Bruce Barcott for The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (to be published by Random House) and Dudley Clendinen for Canterbury Tales (to be published by Viking, Penguin Group). Judges noted that in The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, “Bruce Barcott employs a novel’s worth of colorful characters in his brightly written, tightly focused tale of the battle between those who would build a dam and those who would save a bird.” And about Canterbury Tales, the judges wrote, “Living for years with his subjects—the residents of the geriatric facility that has become his mother’s final home—Dudley Clendinen has produced a sharp and wise portrait of what he rightly calls the ‘new old age’ in America.”
Jurors
Susan Braudy, Kevin Coyne and Richard Pollak
Entry title: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (G.P. Putnam's Sons).
Awarded: 2005, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)
“With clear and powerful prose, Evan Wright has written a classic book of war reportage. But while evoking the timeless themes of camaraderie and brutality, he has also produced something deeper and more unusual. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War is an unforgettable and at times chilling portrait of the modern American soldier. It reveals both the cultural and military mores that members of the Marines First Recon battalion carried with them to Iraq and the ways that they adjusted to the brutal realities of war. The vividness of the writing, the straightforward description of men killing while under fire, the struggles with incompetent leaders and the individual soldiers’ reactions to pervasive violence and death make Wright’s book a major contribution to the literature of war.”
Honorable Mention
Judges also noted one finalist: Jason DeParle's American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (Viking), "a book in the tradition of Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," DeParle combines a history and analysis of the enactment of welfare reform, perhaps the most important legislation enacted by Congress in a generation, with the story of three women on welfare as they, their children, boyfriends and relatives, live through the consequences of the legislation. The book not only reveals the intricacies of politics of public policy but, more importantly, shows the real world behind the rhetoric of the politicians and the welfare experts. DeParle describes in intimate detail the pressures on the women living on marginal incomes, the corruption and incompetence of the men and women who actually decide who gets a check and who does not, and the savage consequences for the children of welfare.
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Tom Edsall, a reporter at the Washington Post and the author of The New Politics of Inequality and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics; David Maraniss, a reporter on the national desk for the Washington Post, is the author of several books, including They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America (Simon & Schuster), which won the 2004 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and First In His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton. For his coverage of Bill Clinton's life and career, Maraniss won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and Elizabeth Rubin, is a freelance journalist whose articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic.
Entry title: Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford University Press)
Awarded: 2005, The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)
“Beasts of the Field tells the story of California farmworkers from the middle of the 18th century to the start of the 20th century. Along the way it introduces an extraordinary host of individuals and groups: Native Americans, Mexicans, Anglos, Chinese, Japanese and various immigrant Europeans. Taken together, their struggles and sufferings constitute a vivid and historically significant panorama of western-and more broadly American-experience. Deeply researched and movingly written, the book itself is a veritable epic with almost Homerian pathos, bringing to life a lost world whose effects and consequences are felt right to the present day.” The Mark Lynton History Prize jurors were John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University; Carla Hesse, Professor of History at the University of California – Berkeley; and Paul Robinson, Professor of History at Stanford University.
Honorable Mention
A finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize was noted: Melvin Patrick Ely, for Israel on the Appomattox: a Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (Knopf), which "recovers a fascinating biracial world--right in the middle of the slave-based Old South--that history had long since forgotten. Based on meticulous and deeply empathic research in a surprisingly rich trove of local records, the book shows whites, enslaved blacks, and, most especially, freed blacks working, living, trading, competing, cooperating, fighting, and (at least occasionally) loving together, in and around a special little place called by the freedpeople Israel Hill. The story stretches from the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson to the Virginia of Appomattox Courthouse. And it is extraordinary--inspiring and heartbreaking, by turns."
Entry title: Home Fires, to be published by Random House
Awarded: 2005, J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($30,000)
“Joan Quigley’s work-in-progress, Home Fires: The Tragedy of an American Mining Town, is a multilayered and passionate study of a community in flames: the old mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which sits atop an underground fire that has been burning for more than four decades. After the fire nearly took the life of a young boy, the community mobilized in an attempt to force the government to take action on “an environmental calamity rivaling Love Canal.” Quigley, a daughter of Centralia, offers a haunting depiction of small town neighbors struggling against a powerful industry and a distant government - and finally, against one another - in their attempt to cope with an environmental catastrophe and the savage backwash of industrial change.”
Honorable Mention
The jurors noted: "On the basis of the Lukas works-in-progress submissions, we believe that some great and even astonishing books are on the way. Yet we have had the gratifying if painful duty of choosing from among these remarkable works-in-progress only one, the one on which, in our view, the Lukas Prize might have the "maximum impact" in carrying to fruition an extraordinary and important work. We also recognize for special citation two finalists, whose works-in-progress hold exceptional ambition and promise and which impress the judges as continuing the kind of work that Tony Lukas did: Amy Bach, for Ordinary Injustice, to be published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., and Steven Greenhouse, for The Big Squeeze, to be published by Knopf.
"In her book on the American legal system, Amy Bach is addressing a familiar topic in a wholly original way. With crack reporting and gripping narrative, she offers a glimpse not at attention-getting injustice (like sleeping lawyers or other "bad apples"), but at the justice system's chronic disservice to ordinary Americans. She is attempting to show how and why those who shape American justice, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and even trial clerks, convince themselves they are part of something fair while they regularly and systematically abet injustice. Her book promises to make disturbing and essential reading.
Steven Greenhouse's, The Big Squeeze, shows how, and why, most Americans are working longer hours for less pay while their country's economy booms. His take on this paradox combines old fashioned-investigative journalism with first rate economic analysis. Greenhouse has a gift for story telling about the way Americans are living now, in every kind of job and in every kind of financial bind. The Big Squeeze could be one of the most important attempts to explain the paradox of so much class and inequality in the richest democracy in the world.
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Mark Danner, Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights, Democracy, and Journalism at Bard College and the author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy; and Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror; Thomas Geoghegan, a lawyer and the author of the recent book In America's Court; and Samantha Power, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.
Entry title: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking)
Awarded: 2004, The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)
"Solnit has given us a beautifully written meditation on speed, space and time told through the tumultuous life of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge," noted the prize jurors. "Playing artfully with the conventions of biography, Solnit peers through the camera's lens and back at the photographer himself. What she sees reveals as much about the bracing modernity of the late 19th century, as about the man who captured it on film. River of Shadows is a stunning account of the origins of cinema, the imagery of the American West, the grandeur and corruption of the transcontinental railroad and the manic ambitions of Leland Stanford, whose speeding racehorse Muybridge froze in time."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists for the Mark Lynton History Prize were noted: Anne Applebaum, for Gulag: A History (Doubleday) and Steven Hahn, for A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press) Judges commented on the works of these finalists: "Using a wide range of sources, from her own travels to material buried deep in Soviet-era archives, Applebaum has produced a judicious, magisterial history of the giant network of prison camps whose scars remain on the Russian psyche today." Of Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet, judges cited "the quiet beauty of the prose, braided into a powerful argument for the importance of its subject to the history and fate of American democracy."
Jurors
The Mark Lynton History Prize jurors were Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns, professor of history at Princeton University and reviewer and essayist for The New Republic; Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, 1999 winner of the J. Anthony Lukas/Mark Lynton Prize and finalist the same year for the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction; and Edward Berenson, author of The Trial of Madame Caillaux and director of the Institute of French Studies at New York University.
Entry title: Slavery Inc., to be published by Random House
Awarded: 2004, J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($45,000)
"John Bowe's work-an examination of slavery throughout the modern world, including the United States-is characterized by a reasoned and painstaking approach to the gathering of his material," said jurors. "His description has no taint of moral superiority. His writing is understated and stylish; he does not labor to make points, he allows the inexorable drift of his narrative to inform and in all places avoids sensationalism. His account gathers force by means of an accumulation of detail rendered with a steady objectivity. Bowe has drawn the reader's awareness to intolerable practices, abuses of the deepest and most indisputable rights of humanity-the right to be free of oppression and economic tyranny. The slow movement forward of human rights will almost surely be advanced by his book."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists for the Work-in-Progress Award were also noted: Eyal Press, for In the Line of Fire, and Beryl Satter, for Family Properties; Cons, Contracts and the Fight to Save Chicago's West Side, 1950-1980. Both are slated to be published by Henry Holt.
"Press' In the Line of Fire offers a heartfelt look at the abortion war in America from all sides as well as, at long last, an invitation to dialogue," noted the judges. "Set in Buffalo, New York, it combines memoir, history and journalism, tackling a subject that could not be more complicated but which rarely receives the level-headed discussion it deserves. Beryl Satter has reached far into her family's past, as well as into a treasure trove of archival material, to show us yet another way in which racism creates more racism as she documents the elaborate and diabolical ways in which white landlords conspired to keep black people homeless in Chicago."
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were James Tobin, author of three books, including To Conquer the Air, which won the 2000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II which won a 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award and Alec Wilkinson, author of Mr. Apology who is currently a writer at The New Yorker; and Madeleine Blais, author of Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family and who is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.
Entry title: They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (Simon & Schuster)
Awarded: 2004, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)
With a reporter's eye for detail, a historian's sense of proportion and a novelist's command of narrative, David Maraniss has written one of the best books about the Vietnam era to date," the judges noted. "Out of one of the most familiar and oft-dissected traumas in recent American history, Maraniss has created a grand epic with a Tolstoyan cast of characters, extraordinary battle scenes and intimate vignettes that reveal the agonizing moral dilemmas of that time and, not coincidentally, ours. They Marched into Sunlight is so fresh and full of light, sound and emotion that the reader feels like an eyewitness to the conflicts being fought in the steamy jungles of southeast Asia, tear-gas-filled streets back home, and closed-door meetings in Washington D.C. It is, in short, a triumph of scholarship and storytelling of the kind the Lukas Prize was created to honor."
Honorable Mention
Judges also noted two finalists: Steve Oney's And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Pantheon) and Franklin Toker's Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House (Knopf). "An exemplary work of historical research and narrative by a masterly journalist, And the Dead Shall Rise vividly portrays the political and social milieu of early 20th century Atlanta in which Leo Frank was convicted of murder, spared execution by the governor, and ultimately lynched," the judges said. "The book combines gripping courtroom narrative with a controlled, knowing exploration of themes of racial and religious tension, the nature of justice, and the role of the press." Of Toker's work, the judges noted: "In Fallingwater Rising, a historian of art and architecture brings imaginative research, fascinating detail, a broad social perspective and gritty prose to the story of one of America's most famous 20th-century buildings-the country house that Frank Lloyd Wright suspended over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937 for E. J. Kaufmann, the merchant prince of Pittsburgh."
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and Knight Professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, author of Me and DiMaggio and A Crooked Man, who is also former daily book reviewer for The New York Times; and James Fallows, author of Breaking the News, winner of the 1981 National Book Award for National Defense and 2003 National Magazine Award for "Iraq: The Fifty-First State?" Fallows is currently national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.
Entry title: Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)
Awarded: 2003, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)
The prize jurors noted: "Samantha Power writes with passion and precision about America's response to genocide in the 20th century. Combining the skills of the journalist, historian, political analyst and activist, she revisits the tragic history of Armenia, Cambodia, Europe in World War II, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. Her research is prodigious, the power of her presentation striking. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide compels a re-examination of American foreign policy in the murderous 20th century and invites reflection upon the complex conflicts that are already defining the new one."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe (Context Books) and Charles Bowden, Down by the River (Simon & Schuster). Jurors noted that The Culture of Make Believe weaves journalism, history, personal anecdote, philosophy and cultural criticism into a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents. Down by the River is both bold and deep in trying to drive into the darkness of lies and danger that guard and surround the drug trade on both sides of the river between the United States and Mexico."
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Diane McWhorter (Carry Me Home), winner of the 2002 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction; David Nasaw (The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst), 2001 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize winner and chair of the doctoral history program at the City University of New York and Richard Reeves (President Nixon: Alone in the White House), a syndicated columnist.
Entry title: Mapping the New World: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Sprawl, to be published by Dial Press
Awarded: 2003, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($45,000)
Judges noted: "Ms. Lessard's work-in-progress starts with a provocative premise and promises to make a thoughtful contribution to our understanding of the environmental issues of our time. Much environmental writing begins and ends as a threnody for the wounded earth. But Lessard takes the built environment seriously as a human artifact, one conceived for many motives, created by many means, and teeming with diverse consequences and meanings. Writing with equal insight about the world that is passing and the one that is replacing it, she addresses the political, social, technical, and aesthetic dimensions of her subject with sympathy, intelligence, and brio."
Honorable Mention
A finalist was also noted: Bruce D. Butterfield, The Mill, to be published by HarperCollins. Jurors noted that the work-in-progress "promises to be a rich and energetic portrait of a colorful and admirable individual, as well as an instructive parable for the de-industrialization of the region that pioneered America's industrial revolution, and a textured exploration of American working-class life in the era of globalization."
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Katherine Boo, a reporter for The Washington Post and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Foundation grant; Nicholas Dawidoff (The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg and The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World), a writer and regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The American Scholar; David M. Kennedy (Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University.
Entry title: The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
Awarded: 2003, The Mark Lynton History Prize
The prize jurors noted: "At the heart of Robert Harms' extraordinary book is an extraordinary document: the journal of Robert Durand, who served as First Lieutenant on the French slave ship the Diligent during its voyage to West Africa, to Martinique, and thence back home to France in 1731-32. It is one of the most complete and descriptive of such documents in existence, and Harms has made the most of it in a vivid and thought-provoking narrative history. His tale centers on the Diligent's voyage, but Harms sets it in a remarkably rich context, drawing on impeccable research and expertise to explain everything from the economics of the slave trade, to the political divisions of West Africa, to the nature of plantation society in the West Indies. Along the way, in a series of wonderfully told digressions, he presents such remarkable characters as John Law, the Scottish adventurer, who became the effective Prime Minister of France, and Bulfinch Lambe, an Englishman who became a slave of the King of Dahomey. But he never loses sight of the most important, if unnamed characters in the story: the 256 Africans who were forcefully taken from the world they knew, crammed into the Diligent's hold under inhuman conditions, and shipped across an ocean to a life of miserable and dangerous servitude. Fourteen did not survive the voyage. One of the most tragic stories in history has been brought to life in Robert Harms' talented hands."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Metropolitan Books), and Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang).
Jurors
Jurors for the Mark Lynton History Prize were Roy Rosenzweig (The Park and the People: A History of Central Park), chair of the department of history at George Mason University; David A. Bell (The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800), professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, and Michael Kazin (America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s), professor of history at Georgetown University.
Entry title: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, Simon & Schuster
Awarded: 2002, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
The prize jurors noted: "Carry Me Home turns the story of the author's hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, into an American epic of race and class conflict. McWhorter's tireless research reveals how the historic and much-studied civil rights movement of the 1960s actually originated in events and characters from the labor and political struggles of preceding decades. McWhorter shifts the lens from the movement's most famous standard-bearers to unfairly neglected pioneers like Fred Shuttlesworth. She also puts human faces on the white resistance, especially those of the local Ku Klux Klan, while tracing the shifting and complex responses of Birmingham's most prominent white citizens. This densely populated, stylishly written book weaves an enormous amount of detail into a powerful tale of moral and social significance."
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Susan Faludi (Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), William Finnegan (Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country) and George Packer (Blood of the Liberals).
Entry title: A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany, Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Company
Awarded: 2002, The Mark Lynton History Prize
Prize jurors noted that the book "provides a new perspective on the German Jews' experience of persecution by the Nazi regime. Intimately focused on the experience of one young woman in Berlin, the book illuminates a much larger canvas of Jewish and of German history. It shows in unexpected ways how the personal can shed light on the political. In fascinating and disturbing detail, the author explores the relations (and the gaps) between history and memory, between official policies and human maneuverings, between group designations and individual self-understandings. Grounded in Mark Roseman's deep and broad knowledge of the Holocaust and in elegant detective work on the life of one of its survivors, the book is artful, subtly and sensitively composed. It leaves the reader with much to ponder on human capacities for coping with deadly oppression and its aftermath."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, Knopf; and James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, University of Chicago Press.
Jurors
Jurors for the Mark Lynton History Prize were Nancy Cott (The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835), Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud) and David Rothman (Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making).
Entry title: On Dams, to be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
Awarded: 2002, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
Judges noted: "Jacques Leslie's work in progress about dams around the world persuasively argues that water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th: an increasingly scarce but crucial natural resource that is `the prize' on a global battlefield. It's a struggle that involves every possible issue-economic globalization, international politics, the clash of cultures, global warming, agricultural policy and conservation. Through the personal and professional experiences of an Indian activist, an American anthropologist and a Dutch engineer, Leslie explores and elucidates this complex material and makes it intelligible in elegant, beautiful prose."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Eugenics and Forced Sterilization in the United States, to be published by Knopf; and Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, Formative Years 1769-1913, to be published by Stanford University Press.
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Ted Conover (Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing), Jonathan Harr (A Civil Action) and Sara Mosle (former editor at The New York Times Magazine and at The New York Times Book Review).
Entry title: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, Houghton Mifflin Company
Awarded: 2001, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
"In a measured, sympathetic, but politically detached narrative, Nasaw manages to take the well-known, myth-enshrouded life of Hearst, and retell it freshly. In addition to painting a brilliantly complex portrait of this fascinating American titan, Nasaw also deftly uses Hearst's life to shed new light on the emergence of America's modern entertainment and information industries. Years in the making, this is an extraordinary work of narrative non-fiction that pays tribute to both the concerns and the impeccable professional standards of Anthony Lukas."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald, Broadway Books, and Book of Honor by Ted Gup, Doubleday.
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Alex Kotlowitz (The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma), Jane Mayer (Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas), and Isabel Wilkerson (Pulitzer Prize-winning writer)
Entry title: Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766, Knopf
Awarded: 2001, The Mark Lynton History Prize
"In this deeply-researched and lively narrative, Anderson vividly recreates the people and politics in the struggle for control of North America involving Britain, France, and powerful Indian entities such as the Iroquois League. He demonstrates that Americans neither anticipated nor desired independence at war's end and focuses our attention on the worldwide conflict of the mid-eighteenth century."
Honorable Mention
A finalist was also noted: Ho Chi Minh by William Duiker, Hyperion.
Jurors
Jurors for the Mark Lynton History Prize were Eric Foner (The Story of American Freedom), David Kertzer (The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara), and Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America)
Entry title: A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission, to be published by Houghton Mifflin
Awarded: 2001, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
Judges found the book "both a worthy and an ideal candidate for a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award: a deeply researched work of contemporary history . . . requiring a combination of journalistic and scholarly skills peculiar to the writing of narrative history, which promises to break new ground on a subject of pressing public significance."
Honorable Mention
A finalist was also noted: Elinor Langer for Death of Mulageta Seraw, to be published by HarperCollins.
Jurors
Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Nancy Hicks Maynard (Maynard Partners Inc.), Thomas Powers (Heisenberg's War), and Rebecca Sinkler (former editor of The New York Times Book Review)
Entry title: A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century, Scribner
Awarded: 2000, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
The jurors said: "In the spirit of Olmsted the book is well-balanced, unassuming in its manner, and at the same time an original and imaginative work."
Jurors
The prize's jurors were Henry Mayer (All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison & the Abolition of Slavery, which won last year's Lukas Book Prize), Frances FitzGerald (Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War and A. Scott Berg (Lindbergh)
Entry title: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press
Awarded: 2000, The Mark Lynton History Prize
The prize's jurors called the book "an extraordinary work of history, fresh, authoritative, entertaining and important." The judges cited the book as, "sensitive and scrupulously fair to both sides, understanding of individual cultural differences but wise about humankind, based on exhaustive research and presented with gracefully crafted language, "Embracing Defeat" exemplifies the qualities so conspicuously present in the work of Tony Lukas."
Jurors
The prize's jurors were Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence), Theodore Rabb (Jacobean Gentlemen: Sir Edwin Sandy 1561-1629) and Geoffrey Ward (The West)
Entry title: Work of the Wind: A Remarkable Family, an Overlooked Genius, and the Race for Flight, to be published by the Free Press
Awarded: 2000, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
The prize's jurors said "the book offers ample 'history news,' about the Wright Brothers -- things we thought we knew about them but in fact did not. The writing is as elegant as the research is surprising."
Honorable Mention
Two finalists were also noted: Larry Tye's forthcoming Diaspora, to be published by Dutton Plume Publishing, which will tell the story of Jews who are forever rooted in Israel but no longer need to live there, who are thriving in secular societies around the world while clinging to a core of shared beliefs and practices that define them as Jews, and Elizabeth Gitter's Buried Alive: Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf Blind Girl, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which tells the little-known story of Laura Bridgman, internationally-celebrated in the 1840s as the first deaf blind person ever to be educated.
Jurors
The prize's jurors were Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography), Susan Sheehan (Is There No Place on Earth for Me?) and David Laventhol (publisher and editorial director of Columbia Journalism Review)
Entry title: All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, St. Martin's Press
Awarded: 1999, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Mayer illustrates how the religious, political, literary, and social forces of 1820-1865 coalesced to bring about a rupture in the American social order.
Jurors
The prize's jurors were David Burnham, Melissa Fay Greene and Jonathan Yardley
Entry title: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed. Terror. and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Houghton Mifflin
Awarded: 1999, The Mark Lynton History Prize
A haunting account of the plundering of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, King Leopold's Ghost tells of the heroic efforts to expose the crimes that eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.
Jurors
The prize's jurors were David Levering Lewis, Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard Snow.
Entry title: The Best Years of Their Lives: One Town's Veterans and How They Changed the World, Viking Penguin
Awarded: 1999, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
The forthcoming book traces the lives of six men from the same New Jersey town as they fight in World War II and return home to create, and in some ways, lose, a sense of community in the succeeding decades
Jurors
The prize's jurors were Samuel Freedman, Cynthia Gorney and Tracy Kidder