Annal:2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2006. 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.
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
- 2006 LATimes–Biography winner
- Score: 10.56
Seven years in the making and meticulously researched—Gabler is the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives—this is the full story of a man whose work left an ineradicable brand on our culture but whose life has largely been enshrouded in myth.
The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte
- 2006 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.56
In 1805, Lorenzo Da Ponte was the proprietor of a small grocery store in New York. But since his birth into an Italian Jewish family in 1749, he had already been a priest, a poet, the lover of many women, a scandalous Enlightenment thinker banned from teaching in Venice, the librettist for three of Mozart’s most sublime operas, a collaborator with Salieri, a friend of Casanova, and a favorite of Emperor Joseph II. He would go on to establish New York City’s first opera house and be the first professor of Italian at Columbia University. An inspired innovator but a hopeless businessman, who loved with wholehearted loyalty and recklessness, Da Ponte was one of the early immigrants to live out the American dream.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography winner
- 2006 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.56
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer’s search for the truth behind his family’s tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
- 2007 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 2006 LATimes–Biography finalist
- 2006 NBCC–Biography finalist
- Score: 22.57
Henry Ward Beecher was, for much of the nineteenth century, America's most widely known public figure. In place of his own preacher father’s fire-and-brimstone theology, Beecher preached a gospel of unconditional love and forgiveness, giving us the Christianity we have today. Men such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him.
And then it fell apart. Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with his best friend’s wife, and the cuckolded Theodore Tilton brought charges of “criminal conversation,” leading to a salacious trial that was the most widely covered event of the nineteenth century, garnering, by some counts, more headlines than the entire Civil War.
Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
- 2006 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.56
They met in 1990 during the first Palestinian uprising—one was an American Jew who served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel, the other, his prisoner, Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Despite their fears and prejudices, they began a dialogue there that grew into a remarkable friendship—and now a remarkable book. It is a book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle East, but one that also shines a ray of hope on that dark, embattled region. A riveting, deeply affecting book: spare, impassioned, energetic, and unstinting in its candor about the truths that lie buried within the animosities of the Middle East.
