Annal:2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2007. 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.
- 2007 Costa-Biography winner
- 2007 LATimes–Biography winner
- 2007 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 26.57
Stalin remains one of the creators of our world—like Hitler, the personification of evil. Yet Stalin hid his past and remains mysterious. This enthralling biography that reads like a thriller finally unveils the secret but extraordinary journey of the Georgian cobbler’s son who became the Red Tsar. What forms such a merciless psychopath and consummate politician? Was he illegitimate? Did he owe everything to his mother—was she whore or saint? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin’s chief gangster? Was he to blame for his wife’s premature death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?
Based on astonishing new evidence, Young Stalin is a history of the Russian Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR—and a fascinatingly intimate biography: this is how Stalin became Stalin.
Boone: A Biography
- 2007 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.57
This commanding biography from New York Times bestselling author Robert Morgan transforms a mythic American hero—a legend in his own time—into a flesh-and-blood man. Morgan’s sweeping biography of Daniel Boone is the story of America—its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. It is the most comprehensive book ever written about the man who was the largest spirit of his time. Hunter, explorer, settler, he was a trailblazer and a revolutionary—an American icon for more than two hundred years.
Extensive endnotes, fascinating cultural and historical background material, maps, illustrations, and an index underscore the scope of this distinguished and immensely entertaining work by a writer who, like novelist-turned-historian Shelby Foote, has the talent and the knowledge to make this legendary American come vividly to life.
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
- 2007 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.57
Founding Father, Revolutionary War hero, vice president, businessman, political strategist, adventurer, alleged murderer and traitor: The public personas of Aaron Burr (1756-1836) are almost too numerous to assess. In recent biographies, Ron Chernow, Joseph Ellis, and Gordon Wood have all disparaged him. Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder uses primary documents to restore the image of this complex man whose story has been mainly told to us through the words of his enemies. A major biography of a most vilified man.
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
- 2007 NBCC–Biography winner
- 2007 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.57
Henry Morton Stanley, so the tale goes, was a cruel imperialist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo. He also conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, opening with, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
But these perceptions are not quite true, Tim Jeal shows in this grand and colorful biography. With unprecedented access to previously closed Stanley family archives, Jeal reveals the amazing extent to which Stanley’s public career and intimate life have been misunderstood and undervalued. Jeal recovers the reality of Stanley’s life—a life of almost impossible extremes—in this moving story of tragedy, adventure, disappointment, and success.
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
- 2007 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 6.57
The first authoritative biography of Wernher von Braun, chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich—creator of the infamous V-2 rocket—who became one of the fathers of the U.S. space program. In this meticulously researched and vividly written life, Michael J. Neufeld gives us a man of profound moral complexities, glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, a man whose brilliance and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition.
Based on new sources, Von Braun is a brilliantly nuanced portrait of a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.
