2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners and Finalists
Presented at UCLA's Royce Hall
BIOGRAPHYWINNER
Neal Gabler, The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf)
FINALISTS
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Rodney Bolt, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America (Bloomsbury USA)
Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide (Alfred A. Knopf)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
CURRENT INTEREST
WINNER
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin Press)
FINALISTS
Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow / HarperCollins)
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Little, Brown)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
FICTION
WINNER
A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem [translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin] (Harcourt)
FINALISTS
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green: A Novel (Random House)
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo: A Novel (Little, Brown)
Susan Straight, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon Books)
Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone: A Novel (Little, Brown)
ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION
WINNER
Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (Black Cat / Grove/Atlantic)
FINALISTS
Tony D'Souza, Whiteman (Harcourt)
Lisa Fugard, Skinner's Drift: A Novel (Scribner)
Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country: A Novel (Scribner)
Janis Cooke Newman, Mary: A Novel (MacAdam/Cage Publishing)
HISTORY
WINNER
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)
FINALISTS
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press)
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking)
John Tayman, The Colony (Lisa Drew / Scribner)
MYSTERY / THRILLER
WINNER
Michael Connelly, Echo Park: A Novel (Little, Brown)
FINALISTS
Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (Riverhead Books)
George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener: A Novel (Little, Brown)
Jess Walter, The Zero: A Novel (HarperCollins)
Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)
POETRY
WINNER
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
FINALISTS
Erin Belieu, Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
Adrian C. Louis, Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press)
Thom Satterlee, Burning Wyclif (Texas Tech University Press)
Michael Waters, Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
WINNER
Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (W.W. Norton)
FINALISTS
Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books)
Ann Gibbons, The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (Doubleday)
Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton)
Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (W.W. Norton)
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
WINNER
Coe Booth, Tyrell (Push / Scholastic)
FINALISTS
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (Dutton Books / Penguin Young Readers Group)
Meg Rosoff, Just in Case (Wendy Lamb Books / Random House Children’s Books)
Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial Books / Penguin Young Readers Group)