Annal:2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest winner
- Score: 10.56
It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the vocally anti-Islam Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that “blasphemed” Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice, which in a very real sense he was…
The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.56
Paris in the '70s was running at full tilt—a new order was coming into view amid hedonism, ambition, and outrageous decadence. This was a fashion revolution, the beginning of fashion as rock-star spectacle, and the world went wild for it. Alicia Drake writes about the dramatic collision and rivalry between two titanic geniuses, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, whose clashes sparked that tumultuous decade. Americans came to Paris in droves - from Andy Warhol and Jerry Hall to Bianca Jagger and Jessica Lange—to be part of this irresistible moment. Others came just to catch sight of Karl Lagerfeld…
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- Score: 6.56
Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story—and clarify your own memories—by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2006 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.
The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie…
- 2007 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
- 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- Score: 18.57
In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate, Shayna Weiss, make a cross-country bike trip. They pitch a tent in the desert of central Oregon. As they are sleeping, a man in a pickup truck deliberately runs over the tent. He then attacks them with an ax. The horrific crime is reported in newspapers across the country. No one is ever arrested. Both women survive, but Shayna suffers from amnesia, while Terri is left alone with memories of the attack. Their friendship is shattered.
Fifteen years later, Terri returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered, on the first of many visits she will make “to solve the crime that would solve me.”
