Annal:2001 Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
- 2001 Kiriyama-Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.51
In the heart of China’s Sichuan province, tucked away amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this vast and ever-evolving country, Fuling is shifting gears and heading down a new path, one of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth.
Its position at the crossroads came into sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the ways of Fuling—and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Red Dust: A Path Through China
- 2001 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
In 1983 Ma Jian, a photographer, painter, poet, and writer, set out for the most remote and roughest parts of China. Dispirited and fearful, accused at work of having “a sluggish mentality,” confronted with a failed marriage, an estranged young daughter, and a girlfriend involved with another man, he abandons Beijing and a life he can no longer endure. Red Dust is the account of his travels, a remarkably written and subtly moving journey toward understanding.
A dropout, a fugitive from the police, a Buddhist in search of enlightenment, Ma Jian embarks on a three-year trek that takes him from the deepest south to the western provinces and Tibet, journeying across deserts, over mountains, through icy rivers. And as he travels to increasingly remote areas, his circumstances become increasingly straitened: He stays in filthy inns, sleeping four to a plank bed, learning to wait until his companions fall asleep and then lying on top of them. To support himself, he buys a pair of scissors and becomes a roadside barber, sells scouring powder as tooth whitener, lives by his wits posing as…
Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
- 2001 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
On the morning of October 31, 1984, as she walked through her garden, smiling, with hands raised and palms pressed together in the traditional Indian namaste greeting, Indira Nehru Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards. She died as she had lived, surrounded by men, yet isolated. It was a violent end to a life of epic drama.
Here is the first popular biography of one of the world’s most influential leaders, India’s third prime minister. Brought up during an era that saw the rise of Indian nationalism, Indira was raised to be what her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, called “a child of revolution”—destined to play a political role in the creation and governing of an independent India. Despite her early reluctance to embrace this role, Indira eventually presided over a huge, complex, religiously riven, and male-dominated country. She was born to a wealthy, westernized family, but she had a gift for connecting with the poor of the countryside and the urban slums, the illiterate, the dispossessed—so much so that “Indira is India” became a familiar slogan. Throughout childhood,…
Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders
- 2001 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
“This book is about an idea that rests at the junction of what we call wilderness and civilization. Simply, it is a call for rethinking, and more importantly, reconstructing, our relationship with nature.”—from Inside Passage.
Protecting land in parks, safe from human encroachment, has been a primary strategy of conservationists for the past century and a half. Yet drawing lines around an area and calling it wilderness does little to solve larger environmental problems. As author Richard Manning puts it in a knowingly provocative way: “Wilderness designation is not a victory, but acknowledgement of defeat.”.
In Inside Passage, Manning takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the lands along the Pacific Northwest’s Inside Passage—from southeast Alaska down through Puget Sound, and then on to the northern Oregon coast and the Columbia River system—as he explores the dichotomy between “wilderness” and “civilization” and the often disastrous effects of industrialization.
Through vivid description and conversations with people in the region, Manning brings…
Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle
- 2001 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness”—which began with civil war and a bloody coup, and saw the construction of the Forbidden City, completion of the Grand Canal, and consolidation of the imperial bureaucracy—was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. In 1368 Yongle’s father, the Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang, led the rebels who reclaimed China from the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty and reigned for 30 years as Emperor Hongwu, establishing the Ming dynasty. But Yongle (Zhu Di, 1360-1424) did not directly succeed his father; the throne first passed briefly to Yongle’s nephew, Emperor Jianwen, whom Yongle drove from the palace (and possibly murdered) in 1402.
The strong, centralized, autocratic government set up by his father and developed by Yongle—which concentrated power in the emperor, his eunuch assistants, and the scholar-advisors of the Grand Secretariat—lasted for more than two centuries. Yongle moved China’s capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, where he constructed the magnificent Forbidden City, in which twenty-three successive…
