Annal:2004 Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Dancing With Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact
- 2004 Kiriyama-Nonfiction winner
- Score: 10.54
In January 1788 the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbors. Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and the people they found living there. Inga Clendinnen offers a fresh reading of the earliest written sources, the reports, letters, and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. It reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader…
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
- 2004 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- 2003 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 12.54
From the early sixteenth century, it was common for British colonizers in India to embarrass the Crown by “turning Turk” or “going native.” Few caused greater scandal than James Kirkpatrick, a British resident in the Court of Hyderabad, who converted to Islam and spied on the East India Company in the midst of an affair with Khair un-Nissa, the great-niece of the region’s prime minister.
White Moguls is rich with many eccentric characters, from “Hindoo Stuart,” who traveled with his own team of Brahmins, to Alexander Gardner, an American whose…
Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files
- 2004 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Harbin in north China was once the heart of a vibrant Russian community of diverse cultural and political origins. But by the mid-1930s, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria drove many Russians to seek refuge elsewhere. For the thousands who returned to their motherland in the Soviet Union, it was a bitter homecoming. At the height of Stalin’s purges, they were arrested as Japanese spies. Some were shot, others sent to labour camp, few survived. Among them were members of the author’s family.
Driven by curiosity and armed with chutzpah, Mara Moustafine…
Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land
- 2004 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Despite all odds, it is often said, India holds together. Perhaps it does, the authors of this brilliantly perceptive examination of Indian society concede, but there are bitter truths that this uncertain success barely conceals. For, even after half a century of independence and the institution of democracy, India remains a deeply divided society, a “fractured land”. While the old inequities of caste and class persist, there are new challenges posed by the advent of extreme religious fundamentalism and an unabashedly consumerist culture.
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
- 2004 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Why did almost one thousand highly educated “student soldiers” volunteer to serve in Japan’s tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to “die like beautiful falling cherry petals” for the emperor.
Drawing on diaries never before published in English,…
