Annal:2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Matisse the Master: Volume 2. The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954
- 2005 LATimes–Biography winner
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography winner
- Score: 20.55
“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless…
Melville: His World and Work
- 2005 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.55
With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses unparalleled historical and critical perspective to give us both a commanding biography and a riveting portrait of the young nation.
The grandson of Revolutionary War heroes, Melville was born into a family that in the fledgling republic had lost…
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
- 2005 LATimes–Biography finalist
- 2005 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 12.55
Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.
On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.
Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had…
The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century
- 2005 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.55
Henry Ford, a major architect of modern America, has lived on in the imagination of his fellow citizens as an enduring figure of fascination, an inimitable individual, a controversial personality, and a social visionary from the moment his Model T brought the automobile to the masses and triggered the consumer revolution. But never before has his outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as by Steven Watts in this major new biography. Watts, the author of the much acclaimed The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, has produced a…
Mencken: The American Iconoclast
- 2005 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.55
A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts—the twentieth century’s greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the most illuminating book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers captures both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs that made him known as “The German Valentino” and his happy marriage at the…
