Annal:1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Under My Skin: Volume 1 of My Autobiography, to 1949
- 1995 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1994 JT Black-Biography winner
- Score: 20.45
“I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by…robust and efficient hands.”
The experiences absorbed through these “skins too few” are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing’s childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage
- 1994 Whitbread-Biography winner
- 1995 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.44
Drawing on nearly 2,000 previously unpublished letters, Brenda Maddox presents a rich and startlingly new portrait of D. H. Lawrence: a hilarious mimic, a lover of nature, an inspired teacher, a brilliant journalist, an ecological visionary, and, above all, a married man. This award-winning work examines Lawrence’s perplexing, restless life through the greatest contradiction in it—his marriage-taking it not just as another aspect of Lawrence but as the encompassing whole. His marriage to Frieda von Richthofen Weekley was a mismatch made in heaven, and yet it…
In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War
- 1995 LATimes–Biography finalist
- 1994 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.45
In Pharaoh’s Army is Tobias Wolff’s unflinching account of his tour in Vietnam, his tangled journey there and back. Using his old wiles and talents, he passes through boot camp, trains as a paratrooper, volunteers for the Special Forces, studies Vietnamese, and—without really believing it himself—becomes an officer in the U.S. Army. Then, inexorably, he finds himself drawn into the war, sent to the Mekong Delta as adviser to a Vietnamese battalion. More or less innocent, self-deluded but rapidly growing less so, he dedicates himself not to victory but to…
Marie Curie: A Life
- 1995 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.45
In this richly textured new biography, Susan Quinn presents us with a far more complicated picture of the woman we thought we knew. Drawing on family documents, Quinn sheds new light on the tragic losses and patriotic passion that infused Marie Sklodowska Curie’s early years in Poland. And through access to Marie Curie’s journal, closed to researchers until 1990, we hear in her own words of the intimacy and joy of her marriage to Pierre Curie and the depth of her despair at his premature death.
The image of Marie Curie as the grieving widow, attired always in…
Drinking the Rain: A Memoir
- 1995 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.45
At the age of fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast. Living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone, she discovered in herself a new independence and a growing sense of oneness with the world that redefined her notions of waste, time, necessity, and pleasure. With wit, lyricism, and fearless honesty, Shulman describes a quest that speaks to us all: to build a new life of creativity and spirituality, self-reliance and self-fulfillment.
