Annal:1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest

Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century

O.B. Hardison, Jr.

• 1990 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• Score: 10.4

 

The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath

Kevin Phillips

• 1990 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• Score: 6.4

The enormous concentration of wealth in the United States during the 1980s—most of it in the hands of the top 1% of the population—will provoke what Phillips calls a watershed change in American politics. His masterly analysis portrays the public’s growing concern over this unequal distribution of wealth and the Republican policies that enhanced the imbalance.

My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

Rian Malan

• 1990 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• Score: 6.4

A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor’s Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile. Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid’s legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor’s Heart is an astonishing book—beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.

Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala

Vaclav Havel, Paul Wilson

• 1990 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• Score: 6.4

An intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

Rick Atkinson

• 1990 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• Score: 6.4

The first trade paperback edition of the New York Times best-seller about West Point’s Class of 1966, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Atkinson.

This is the story of the twenty-five-year adventure of the generation of officers who fought in Vietnam. With novelistic detail, Atkinson tells the story of West Point’s Class of 1966 primarily through the experiences of three classmates and the women they loved—from the boisterous cadet years and youthful romances to the fires of Vietnam, where dozens of their classmates died and hundreds more grew disillusioned, to the hard peace and family adjustments that followed. The rich cast of characters includes Douglas MacArthur, William Westmoreland, and a score of other memorable figures. The West Point Class of 1966 straddled a fault line in American history, and Rick Atkinson’s masterly book speaks for a generation of American men and women about innocence, patriotism, and the price we pay for our dreams.