Annal:2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.52
Sex is a wonderful, crucial part of growing up, and children and teens can enjoy the pleasures of the body and be safe, too. In this important and controversial book, Judith Levine makes this argument and goes further, asserting that America’s attempts to protect children from sex are worse than ineffectual. It is the assumption of danger and the exclusive focus on protection—what Levine terms “the sexual politics of fear”—that are themselves harmful to minors.
Through interviews with young people and their parents, stories drawn from today’s headlines, visits to classrooms and clinics, and a look back at the ways sex among children and teenagers has been viewed throughout history, Judith Levine debunks some of the dominant myths of our society. She examines and challenges widespread anxieties (pedophilia, stranger kidnapping, Internet pornography) and sacred cows (abstinence-based sex education, statutory rape laws). Levine investigates the policies and practices that affect kids’ sex lives—censorship, psychology, sex and AIDS education, family, criminal, and reproductive…
Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.52
Seeing in the Dark is a poetic love letter to the skies and a stirring report on the revolution now sweeping amateur astronomy, in which backyard stargazers linked globally by the Internet are exploring deep space and making discoveries worthy of the professionals. Timothy Ferris invites us all to become stargazers, recounting his lifelong experiences as an enthralled stargazer, and capturing the exquisite experience when ancient starlight strikes the eye and incites the mind.
Reporting from around the globe—from England and Italy to the Florida Keys and the Chilean Andes—on the revolution that’s putting millions in touch with the night sky, Ferris also offers an authoritative and magical description of what is out there to be seen, from the rings of Saturn to remote quasars whose light is older than Earth.
Astronomy is the most accessible and democratic of all the sciences: Anyone can get started in it just by going outside with a star chart on a dark night and looking up. A pair of binoculars suffices to see galaxies millions of light-years away, and a small telescope can…
The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.52
A prize-winning group of war reporters and analysts looks back on the killing fields of the late twentieth century and poses provocative questions for the future of human rights.
The New Killing Fields revisits Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor-sites of four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing in the last half of the twentieth century-in order to reconsider the success and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian intervention.
Through original essays and reporting by, among others, David Rieff, Peter Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley, and Samantha Power, The New Killing Fields reaches beyond headlines to ask vital questions about the future of peacekeeping in the next century. In addition, theoretical essays by Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff frame the issue of both past and future intervention in terms of today’s post-Cold War reality. As human rights abuses increasingly occur in “failed states” such as Afghanistan, which pose international security threats, the future of human rights will…
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
- 2003 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 26.53
A character-driven study of some of the darkest moments in our national history, when America failed to prevent or stop 20th-century campaigns to exterminate Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans .
Drawing upon declassified cables, private papers, exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy-makers, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Samantha Power tells the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of the worst massacres of the twentieth century.
In this masterful work of social history, Power examines how, in the five decades since the Holocaust, Americans have very rarely marshaled their might to stop genocide and mass terror. Indeed, she shows how the U.S. response to recent genocides bears striking resemblance to the American response to reports of Hitler’s Final Solution. By paying particular attention to the last thirty years of world carnage, which coincided with the growth of Holocaust awareness in the United States, Power dissects how the historical memory of the Holocaust can co-exist with an American…
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
- 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.52
For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips’ insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation’s most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our “modern Thomas Paine.” Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States’ history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls “the Second Gilded Age” at the turn of the twenty-first century.
The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy,…
