Annal:1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black
- 1995 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.45
As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black.
In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along…
Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots
- 1995 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.45
Blue Dreams shows how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the crossroads of conflicting social reflections in the aftermath of the 1992 riots.
The situation of Los Angeles’s Korean Americans touches on some of the most vexing issues facing American society today: ethnic conflict, urban poverty, immigration, multiculturalism, and ideological polarization. Combining interviews and deft sociohistorical analysis, Blue Dreams gives these…
We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy
- 1995 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.45
In a new preface to this foundational book on the American jury, Abramson responds to his critics, defends his views on the jury as an embodiment of deliberative democracy in action, and reflects on recent jury trials and reforms.
Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps
Sarah McLanahan, Gary Sandefur
- 1995 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.45
Nonwhite and white, rich and poor, born to an unwed mother or weathering divorce, over half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family—and these children simply will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. This is the clear and urgent message of this powerful book. Based on four national surveys and drawing on more than a decade of research, Growing Up with a Single Parent sharply demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child’s prospects for success.
What are the chances that…
Beyond Individualism: How Social Demands of the New Identity Groups Challenge American Political and
- 1995 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.45
The Reagan and Bush years left us with a troublesome dilemma: how to balance our budget deficit against our social deficit. This book takes up the urgent question of how, in a time of budgetary stringency, we can meet the pent-up demand for spending on our nation’s neglected poor, ill, and disadvantaged, old and young.
Michael Piore’s response is to develop a new social theory that balances individual preferences against the claims and responsibilities of the community. By explaining the role of groups in economic and social life, this theory makes sense of a…
