Annal:2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The New Chinese Empire And What It Means for the United States
- 2003 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.53
A leading expert’s brilliant analysis of how China will finally accept liberalism, and what that will mean for the United States.
Some observers expect China to become an economic superpower. Others expect it to fragment into pieces. Is China nationalistic and on the march, or is it a stumbling Communist dinosaur? Is it already a billion-citizen member of the global village? Is it, as the Clinton administration claimed, a “strategic partner” of the U.S.?
Ross Terrill addresses the question upon which all these others depend: Is the People’s Republic of China, whose polity is a hybrid of Chinese tradition and Western Marxism, willing to become a modern nation or does it insist on remaining an empire? Since the collapse of three thousand years of Confucian monarchy in 1911, China has neither established a successful political system nor adjusted to being a nation state. Today it stands as the most contradictory of major powers, hovering between an unsustainable tradition and a yet-to-be-born political form that would support its new society and economy. Hanging in the balance…
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
- 2003 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.53
Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this “divinely inspired” crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil…
Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11
- 2003 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.53
The story of the years leading up to 9/11 is the story of what might have been, and also serves as a call to the defense of America’s future. Since 9/11, one important question has persisted: What was really going on behind the scenes with intelligence services and government leaders during the time preceding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks?
After an eighteen-month investigation that uncovered explosive new evidence through interviews and in classified documents, Gerald Posner reveals much previously undisclosed information:
- the identity of two countries that might have had foreknowledge that a terrorist attack was scheduled for September 11 on U.S. soil
- a startling account of the interrogation of a leading al Qaeda captive
- facts about a series of deaths that point to an ongoing conspiracy by some governments to hide the extent of their earlier relationships with al Qaeda
- how the U.S. government missed several chances to kill or capture bin Laden
- evidence that German intelligence may have protected an informant who was involved with many of the 9/11 plotters
- …
Cut Time: An Education at the Fights
- 2003 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.53
Boxing is not just fighting; it is also training and living right and preparing to go the distance in the broadest sense of the phrase, a relentless managing of self that anyone who gets truly old must learn.”
— from Cut Time
As his affection for boxing grows, Carlo Rotella discovers that it sheds a startling light on the world outside the ring. The brief, disastrous boxing career of one of his students pinpoints the moment when adulthood arrives. The hard-won insight of a fellow fan shows Rotella how to process the trauma of a car crash. The persistence of a wizened ex–lightweight champion gives him the key to understanding and honoring his grandmother.
Rotella unearths the hidden wisdom in any kind of fight, from barroom dustup to HBO extravaganza. He vividly describes the tough choices and subtle pleasures that come the way of every fighter, from perennial underdogs on the tank-town circuit to Larry Holmes, an all-time great who still spars to retching exhaustion at the age of fifty. As Rotella traces his surprising immersion in the fight world,…
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
- 2003 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.53
Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative.
When the marines—or “jarheads,” as they call themselves—were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper’s rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.
Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what…
