Annal:2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
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 History
- History books
- History authors
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
- 2007 LATimes–History winner
- 2007 NBA–Nonfiction winner
- 2007 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 26.57
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.
The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
- 2007 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.57
The twentieth century is usually seen as the century of total war, but as historian David Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the age of Napoleon. Bell takes us from campaigns of extermination in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction, and our modern attitudes toward war were born. Ever since, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound tightly together in the Western worldwhere wars of liberation, such as the one in Iraq, can degenerate into gruesome guerrilla conflict. With a historians keen insight and a journalists flair for detail, Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleons day and our own in a book that is as timely and important as it is unforgettable.
The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II
- 2007 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.57
The battle for Moscow was the biggest battle of World War II—the biggest battle of all time. And yet it is far less known than Stalingrad, which involved about half the number of troops. For seven months beginning in September 1941, seven million troops were engaged in this titanic struggle. The combined losses of both sides were 2.5 million, of which nearly 2 million were on the Soviet side. But the Soviet capital narrowly survived, and for the first time the German Blitzkrieg ended in failure. This shattered Hitler’s dream of a swift victory over the Soviet Union and radically changed the course of the war.
The full story of this epic battle has never been told because it undermines the sanitized Soviet accounts of the war, which portray Stalin as a military genius and his people as heroically united against the German invader. Drawing on recently declassified documents from Soviet archives, including files of the dreaded NKVD; on accounts of survivors and of children of top Soviet military and government officials; and on reports of Western diplomats and correspondents, The Greatest Battle finally illuminates the full story of a clash between two systems based on sheer terror and relentless slaughter.
Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World
- 2007 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.57
In February 1972, Richard Nixon, the first American president ever to visit China, and Mao Tse-tung, the enigmatic Communist dictator, met for an hour in Beijing. Nixon thought China could help him get out of Vietnam. Mao needed American technology and expertise to repair the damage of the Cultural Revolution. Both men wanted an ally against an aggressive Soviet Union. Did they get what they wanted? Did Mao betray his own revolutionary ideals? How did the people of China react to this apparent change in attitude toward the imperialist Americans? Did Nixon make a mistake in coming to China as a supplicant? And what has been the impact of the visit on the United States ever since?
Weaving together fascinating anecdotes and insights, an understanding of Chinese and American history, and the momentous events of an extraordinary time, this brilliantly written book looks at one of the transformative moments of the twentieth century and casts new light on a key relationship for the world of the twenty-first century.
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
- 2007 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.57
On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons began perhaps the most crucial debate in British parliamentary history. On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government and also of Britain—indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson’s fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government’s defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe’s tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister’s resignation.
Some historians dismiss the “phony war” that preceded this turning point as a time of waiting and inaction, but Olson makes no such mistake, and describes in dramatic detail the public unrest that spread through Britain then, as people realized how poorly prepared the nation was to confront Hitler and how their basic civil liberties were being jeopardized. The political and personal dramas that played out in Parliament and in the nation as Britain faced the threat of fascism virtually on its own are extraordinary—and, in Olson’s hands, downright inspiring.
