Annal:2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
- History books
- History authors
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
- 2001 LATimes–History winner
- Score: 10.51
Before the Storm begins in a time much like the present-the tail end of the 1950s, with America affluent, confident, and convinced that political ideology was a thing of the past.
But when John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, conservatives—editor William F. Buckley, Jr., John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, and thousand of students—formed a movement to challenge the center-left consensus. They chose as their hero Barry Goldwater—a rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy, reviled détente, despised liberals on sight-and grew determined to see him elected President.
Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But by the campaign’s end the consensus found itself squeezed from the left and the right; and two decades later, the conservatives had elected Ronald Reagan as President and Goldwater’s ideas had been adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike.
The story of the rise of conservatism during a liberal era has never been told, and Rick Perlstein’s gutsy narrative history is full of portraits of figures from Nelson Rockefeller…
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
- 2002 Pulitzer–History winner
- 2001 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 16.52
A riveting, original book about the creation of modern American thought.
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea—an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things “out there” waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent—like knives and forks and microchips—to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely depent—like germs—on their human carriers and environment. And they thought…
The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake
- 2001 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.51
William Blake’s wife once said of him: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.” This fascinating and generously illustrated biography of the great English artist, poet, and mystic brings us very much into Blake’s company, presenting, often in the words of his contemporaries, almost everything that is known of his life and times.
G.E. Bentley, Jr., tells us that although Blake struggled with the ways of the world in his youth and early manhood, he was always frustrated that these ways were not his own. Instead he spoke the language of radical religious dissent, standing outside the popular political and social conventions of his time and lamenting the power of Church and State. Blake learned to participate in traditions of vision and piety, to exult in the power of the spirit and in visionary art and literature. He created a new gospel of art, other-worldly and fundamentally spiritual, and in his old age, he exhibited a serenity in poverty and a devotion to the realm of the spirit that was revered by his disciples. Blake’s life bears the shape…
France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944
- 2001 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.51
- 2001 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.51
Garry Wills’s Venice: Lion City is a tour de force—a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world’s most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembles in its combination of art and sea empire. The structure of Venetian society was based on its distinctive practice of religion: Venice elected its priests, defied the authority of papal Rome, and organized its liturgy around a lay leader (the doge).
Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city’s history. In their culture, their governing structures, and their social life, the Venetians themselves speak to us with extraordinary immediacy, whether at work, warfare, prayer, or acting out their victories, celebrations, and petitions in the colorful festivals that punctuated the…
