Annal:1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1997. 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.
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography
- 1997 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1998 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.47
Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad—including still-classified KGB dossiers—Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America’s greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers’s days as New York’s “hottest literary…
Nazimova: A Biography
- 1997 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
A major rediscovery—a full-scale biography—of the electrifying Russian-born actress who brought Stanislavksy and Chekhov to American theatre, who was applauded, lionized, adored—a legend of the stage and screen for forty years, and then strangely forgotten. Her shockingly natural approach to acting transformed the theatre of her day. She thrilled Laurette Taylor.
The first time Tennessee Williams saw her he knew he wanted to be a playwright (“She was so shatteringly powerful that I couldn’t stay in my seat”). Eugene O’Neill said of her that she gave him his…
Burning the Days: Recollection
- 1997 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America’s finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man’s sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired.
Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father’s wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air…
Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life
- 1997 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
Filling a remarkable gap, Alan Schom, an acclaimed historian, scholar and author, offers the most complete picture ever of Napoleon Bonaparte, “the scourge of Europe” and France’s greatest hero. Based on more than 10 years of exhaustive research, Schom illuminates Napoleon’s important economic and social reforms, his reorganization of the French government and his tempestuous personal life and its effect on his political decisions. Remarkably ambitious and compulsively readable, Napoleon Bonaparte covers every aspect of l’Empereur’s life and career—from…
- 1997 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.47
He was a top box-office draw in his day, an Oscar-winning actor, a principled man of rare conviction, and—long after his death—a cult figure revered by moviegoers who weren’t even born while he was making his movies. But over the years, Humphrey Bogart has remained an enigma, despite what we have learned of him from wife Lauren Bacall’s own fond memories and from the various biographies that have appeared over the years since his death in 1957.
With Bogart, this wonderful enigma is brought under the light as never before. Although authors Ann M. Sperber…
