Annal:2005 Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
- 2005 Kiriyama-Nonfiction winner
- 2005 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.55
A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people—a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself—from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist.
A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us a true insider’s view of this stunning city, bringing to his account a rare level of insight, detail, and intimacy. He approaches the city from unexpected angles—taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs who wrest control of the city’s byzantine political and commercial systems…following the life of a bar dancer who chose the only life available to her after a childhood of poverty and abuse…opening the doors onto the fantastic, hierarchical inner sanctums of Bollywood…delving into the stories of the countless people who come from the villages in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks—the essential saga of a great city endlessly played out.
Through it all—as each individual story unfolds—we hear Mehta’s own story: of the mixture of love, frustration, fascination,…
The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders
- 2005 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures.
His personal struggles—as well as his many personal triumphs—are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of Noguchi. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist’s birth, the book draws on Noguchi’s letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships.
During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked…
The Devil's Highway: A True Story
- 2005 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- 2005 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.55
In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, a place called the Devil’s Highway. Twenty-six people—fathers and sons, brothers and strangers—entered a desert so harsh and desolate that even the Border Patrol is afraid to travel through it. For hundreds of years, men have tried to conquer this land, and for hundreds of years the desert has stolen their souls and swallowed their blood.
Along the Devil’s Highway, days are so hot that dead bodies naturally mummify almost immediately. And that May, twenty-six men went in. Twelve came back out.
Now, Luis Alberto Urrea tells the story of this modern Odyssey. He takes us back to the small towns and unpaved cities south of the border, where the poor fall prey to dreams of a better life and the sinister promises of smugglers. We meet the men who will decide to make the crossing along the Devil’s Highway and, on the other side of the border, the men who are ready to prevent them from reaching their destination. Urrea reveals exactly what happened…
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
- 2005 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
A gripping and definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times.
In the three and a half years of Pol Pot’s rule, more than a million Cambodians, a fifth of the country’s population, were executed or died from hunger. An idealistic and reclusive figure, Pol Pot sought to instill in his people values of moral purity and self-abnegation through a revolution of radical egalitarianism. In the process his country descended into madness, becoming a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which obedience was enforced on the killing fields.
How did a utopian dream of shared prosperity mutate into one of the worst nightmares humanity has ever known? To understand this almost inconceivable mystery, Philip Short explores Pol Pot’s life from his early years to his death. Short spent four years traveling throughout Cambodia interviewing the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement, many of whom have never spoken before, including Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and the former Khmer Rouge head of state. He also sifted through…
The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change
- 2004 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- 2005 Kiriyama-Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.54
Scientists and natives wrestle with our changing climate in the land where it has hit first—and hardest.
A traditional Eskimo whale-hunting party races to shore near Barrow, Alaska—their comrades trapped on a floe drifting out to sea—as ice that should be solid this time of year gives way. Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, sleeping in tents, surviving on frozen chocolate, and measuring the snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the effects of albedo, the snow’s reflective ability to cool the earth beneath it.
Climate change isn’t an abstraction in the far North. It is a reality that has already dramatically altered daily life, especially that of the native peoples who still live largely off the land and sea. Because nature shows her footprints so plainly here, the region is also a lure for scientists intent on comprehending the complexities of climate change. In this gripping account, Charles Wohlforth follows the two groups as they navigate a radically shifting landscape. The scientists attempt to decipher its smallest elements and to derive…
