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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
