Annal:1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1996. Note that Ashes to Ashes received no honor points for this category because it was also a finalist for the History category. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.46
From the center of the nightmare in Bosnia, a war correspondent’s flaming montage of images—eerie, grotesque, ironic, angry, absurd. A Serb and a Muslim, friends before the war, exchanging gossip via shortwave radio only hours before they will try to kill each other. A Sarajevo couple passionately refusing to go anywhere together for fear a mortar shell might orphan their children. A battlefield doctor performing miracles of surgery without anesthetics.
In episode after episode, Peter Maass takes us with him into the minefields of modern war: a whole country…
All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 1995 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.46
Considered by many to be the most dangerous inmate in the history of the New York penal system, Willie Bosket is a brilliant, violent man who began his criminal career at age five. His slaying of two subway riders at fifteen led to the passage of the first law in the nation allowing teenagers to be tried as adults. Yet sadly, Willie is not an aberration within the Bosket family—but rather the latest in a long line of brutal, exceptionally intelligent malefactors who were driven by circumstances, racism, and a distinctly American craving for respect by any means…
Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
- 1997 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1996 LATimes–History finalist
- 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist*
- Score: 22.47
No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes—mankind’s most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product—with such sweep and enlivening detail. Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process—financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal—are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever…
- 1995 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 1995 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.45
Two of the nation’s largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything—including his sanity.
A Civil Action is the searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry—one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice. Yet it is also the story of how one man can ultimately make a difference. With an unstoppable narrative power…
Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.46
It is a story of obstacles—physical, emotional, and psychic—overcome again and again. Whether riding a mule up a hillside in Iraq surrounded by mud-stained Kurdish refugees, navigating his wheelchair through intractable stretches of Middle Eastern sand, or auditioning to be the first journalist in space, John Hockenberry, ace reporter, is determined not only to bring back the story, but also to prove that nothing can hold him back from death-defying exploits. In this moving chronicle—so filled with marvelous storytelling that it reads like a novel—John…
Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.46
An 8-year old boy holding a knife to his younger brother’s throat. Three small children who watch their older sister jump out of a twenty-third story window, following their mother’s orders. Two boys whose mother believes they are all victims of a hex laid on them by her ex-husband. An eleven-year-old boy at a fashionable Manhattan address whose mother is so drunk she can’t keep her robe closed when child welfare workers come to visit.
These are the heroes of Marc Parent’s Turning Stones, small and unsuspecting victims of a society, and of a bureaucracy,…
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.46
Thirty years ago, two young biologists named Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson triggered a far-reaching scientific revolution. In a book titled The Theory of Island Biogeography, they presented a new view of a little-understood matter: the geographical patterns in which animal and plant species occur. Why do marsupials exist in Australia and South America, but not in Africa? Why do tigers exist in Asia, but not in New Guinea?
Influenced by MacArthur and Wilson’s book, an entire generation of ecologists has recognized that island biogeography—the…
The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA
- 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.46
Thomas has drawn on his original research in CIA archives and interviews with scores of old agency hands to evoke the urgency and uncertainty, as well as the giddiness, of the shadow wars of the 1950s and early 1960s when the country, with reason, felt itself in danger from Soviet-led Communist aggression. Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald embodied the confidence, daring, and arrogance of the WASP elite that dominated the CIA at its founding.
Thomas brings these men to life as they move boldly, and a bit innocently, into the…
