Annal:2002 Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey
- 2002 Kiriyama-Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.52
In 1988, Dr. John Casey, a professor visiting Burma, meets a waiter in Mandalay with a passion for the works of James Joyce, and the encounter changes both their lives.
Pascal, a member of the Kayan Padaung tribe, was the first member of his community to study English at a university. Within months of his meeting with Dr. Casey, Pascal’s world lay in ruins. Burma’s military dictatorship forces him to sacrifice his studies, and the regime’s brutal armed forces murder his lover. Fleeing to the jungle, he becomes a guerrilla fighter in the life-or-death struggle against the government. In desperation, he writes a letter to the Englishman he met in Mandalay.
Miraculously reaching its destination, the letter leads to Pascal’s rescue and his enrollment in Cambridge University, where he is the first Burmese tribesman ever to attend.
From the Land of Green Ghosts unforgettably evokes the realities of life in modern-day Burma and one man’s long journey to freedom despite almost unimaginable odds.
Singing to the Dead: A Missioner's Life among Refugees from Burma
- 2002 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
It is 1992, and the Burmese government’s current war on its indigenous people runs into its fourth year. In neighboring Thailand, a small band of Buddhist monks harbors refugees from Burma inside their modest temple in the slums of Bangkok. The monks and refugees are all natives of the Burmese Mon State. All have the same residential status in Thailand: illegal. Under surveillance, and overwhelmed by the needs of their charges, the monks reach out to international aid agencies in Bangkok for help in ministering to the tortured, the wounded, the diseased, and the orphaned.
Singing to the Dead recalls a Catholic lay missioner’s work alongside the Mon Buddhist monks of Bangkok. For more than two years, Victoria Armour-Hileman was a go-between for the monks, interceding with the world outside their temple walls for everything from a cornea transplant for a land mine victim to money to buy shoes for barefoot orphans. At the same time, Singing to the Dead details an aid worker’s ongoing education: how to weave through an embassy bureaucracy, how to stave off burnout, how to pull…
Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement
- 2002 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy.
Harrison shows why North Korea is not—as many policymakers expect—about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel.
Similarly, he proposes specific trade-offs to forestall the North’s development of nuclear weapons and…
Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912
- 2002 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
When Emperor Meiji began his rule, in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire, dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, who ruled over the country’s more than 250 decentralized domains and who were, in the main, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state.
Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first emperor ever to meet a European. Most historians discuss the period that takes his name while barely mentioning the man, assuming that he had no real involvement in affairs of state. Even Japanese who believe Meiji to have been their nation’s greatest ruler may have trouble recalling a single personal accomplishment that might account for such a glorious reputation. Renowned Japan scholar Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during…
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
- 2002 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
An unprecedented, intimate account of the lives of modern Chinese women, told by the women themselves—true stories of the political and personal upheavals they have endured in their chaotic and repressive society.
For eight groundbreaking years, Xinran hosted a radio program in China during which she invited women to call in and talk about themselves. Broadcast every evening, Words on the Night Breeze became famous throughout the country for its unflinching portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in modern China. Centuries of obedience to their fathers, husbands and sons, followed by years of fear under Communism, had made women terrified of talking openly about their feelings. Xinran won their trust and, through her compassion and ability to listen, became the first woman to hear their true stories.
This unforgettable book is the story of how Xinran negotiated the minefield of restrictions imposed on Chinese journalists to reach out to women across the country. Through the vivid intimacy of her writing, these women confide in the reader, sharing their deepest secrets. Whether…
