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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
