Annal:2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
- 2001 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.51
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes “undercover” as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you want to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in…
States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering
- 2001 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.51
Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know, wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see … these are all expressions of “denial”. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner’s infidelity, the wife who doesn’t notice that her husband is abusing their daughter—are supposedly “in denial”. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve “maximum deniability”. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene.
Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public’s apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always so bad—or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity? States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of…
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued
- 2001 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.51
In this provocative book, award-winning economics journalist Ann Crittenden argues that although women have been liberated, mothers have not. Drawing on hundreds of interviews from around the country, as well as the most current research in economics, sociology, history, child development, and law, she shows how mothers are systematically disadvantaged and made dependent by a society that celebrates the labor of child-rearing but undervalues and even exploits those who perform it.
The price of motherhood is everywhere apparent. College-educated women pay a “mommy tax” of more than a million dollars in lost income when they have a child. Family law deprives mothers of financial equality in marriage. Most child care is excluded from the gross domestic product, at-home mothers are not counted in the labor force, and the social safety net simply leaves them out.
With passion and clarity, Crittenden dismantles the principal argument for the status quo: that it’s a woman’s “choice.” She demonstrates, on the contrary, that if mothers had more resources and respect, everyone—including…
The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court
- 2001 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.51
In 1971, William Rehnquist seemed the perfect choice to fill a seat on the United States Supreme Court. He was a young, well-polished lawyer who shared many of President Richard Nixon’s philosophies and faced no major objections from the Senate. But in truth, the nomination was anything but straightforward. Now, for the first time, former White House counsel John Dean tells the improbable story of Rehnquist’s appointment.
Dean weaves a gripping account packed with stunning new revelations: of a remarkable power play by Nixon to stack the court in his favor by forcing resignations; of Rehnquist himself, who played a role in the questionable ousting of Justice Abe Fortas; and of Nixon’s failed impeachment attempt against William O. Douglas. In his initial confirmation hearings, Rehnquist provided outrageous and unbelievable responses to questions about his controversial activities in the ‘50s and ‘60s—yet he was confirmed with little opposition. It was only later, during his confirmation as Chief Justice, that his testimony would come under fire—raising serious questions…
Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore
- 2001 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.51
Ron Powers’ hometown is Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, and therefore birthplace of our image of boyhood itself. Powers returns to Hannibal to chronicle the horrific story of two killings, both committed by minors, and the trials that followed. Seamlessly weaving the narrative of the events in Hannibal with the national withering of the very concept of childhood, Powers exposes a fragmented adult society where children are left adrift, transforming isolation into violence.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore is a powerful, disturbing, and eye-opening dispatch from the homefront that will take its place alongside the works of Antony Lucas, Robert Coles, and Tracy Kidder.
