Annal:1992 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
- History books
- History authors
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors.
Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism
- 1992 LATimes–History winner
- Score: 10.42
A profoundly moving history of Italy’s Jews under the shadow of the Holocaust, told through the lives of five Jewish Italian families: the Ovazzas of Turin, who prospered under Mussolini and whose patriarch became a prominent fascist; the Foas of Turin, whose children included both an antifascist activist and a Fascist Party member; the Di Verolis of Rome, who struggled for survival in the ghetto; the Teglios of Genoa, one of whom worked with the Catholic church to save hundreds of Jews; and the Schonheits of Ferrara, who were sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck.
An extraordinary montage that resurrects a forgotten and tragic era.
Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China
- 1992 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.42
In March 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar at The Johns Hopkins University, of being “the top Soviet espionage agent in the U.S.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee exonerated Lattimore four months later, but for the next two years Pat McCarran and his Senate Internal Security Committee investigated him, forcing the Justice Department to indict him for perjury. The case was eventually dismissed, but only after extraordinary efforts by the FBI failed to unearth a single reliable witness who could testify against Lattimore.
Lattimore was a victim of the virulent witch hunts that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s after China, our friend and ally in World War II, went over to that reviled enemy, communism. Americans could not believe that China made this choice freely; its adherence to the World Communist Conspiracy must have been coerced by Soviet manipulation and domestic subversion by Americans. Some Communist mastermind in the American government had to be blamed for our “loss” of China. Lattimore, who had never been in…
Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People
- 1992 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.42
The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics
- 1992 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.42
Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People
- 1992 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.42
In the 1850s, in despair after sixty years of disastrous wars and British betrayals that had cost them most of their ancestral lands, the Xhosa—South Africa’s most important and sophisticated black nation—gave way to a strange and dangerous teaching. Prophets among them declared that salvation lay in killing all their cattle, their most prized possession, and destroying all their food stocks. If they did this, the prophets said, on a certain day everything would be returned to them by supernatural agency and in much greater abundance—huge new herds, copious supplies of grain, and the white man would be expelled from the lands he had stolen.
The herds were slaughtered, the appointed day came, and passed; thousands of Xhosa starved to death. Yet these cataclysmic events were in fact, as Noel Mostert makes vividly clear in Frontiers, only the cruel climax of a far larger history that had begun hundreds of years before with the slow migration of Xhosa ancestors out of Central Africa toward the Cape, and the coming of the earliest Portuguese explorers in search of a route to India.
South…
