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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
