Times Honors Books on Hollywood, Rights Era

A history of the Jewish immigrants who founded the American film industry and a recounting of Martin Luther King Jr.’s pivotal role in the civil rights movement were among six books named Thursday as winners of the 1989 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.

At a reception for publishers in New York, Times Book Editor Jack Miles announced that Neal Gabler, author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” had won the history award, and Taylor Branch, author of “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963,” will receive the current-interest book prize.

Each winner receives a $1,000 cash award and a copy of the winning book hand-bound in leather.

English novelist Fay Weldon won the fiction award for “The Heart of the Country,” the tale of a pampered wife and mother whose husband runs off to Spain with his secretary and leaves her to fend for herself in Britain’s suburban countryside.

Tobias Wolff won the biography award for “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir,” his story of growing up in a small Washington town.

Donald Hall received the poetry prize for “The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts,” a book-length work that, through various characters, explores topics ranging from middle-aged disappointment to the lures of adultery and consumerism and, finally, aging and death.

Frans de Waal won the science and technology award for “Peacemaking Among Primates,” his account of peace-making strategies of five different species, including man and his closest primate cousins.

Winning authors will be honored at The Times on Nov. 3, when the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award will be announced.

The Kirsch Award--presented annually to a living author who has focused on the West and whose career contributions to American letters deserve body-of-work recognition--is named after The Times’ late book critic.

In his review of Gabler’s “lively and scholarly history,” Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin praised the author for his “detailing of the manners and mores” of the Jewish immigrants in Hollywood--men like Adolph Zukor; Carl Laemmle; Louis Mayer; the Warner brothers, Harry, Jack, Albert and Sam, and Harry Cohn.

Gabler, who lives with his wife and two daughters in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., tells how the men fashioned an image of America based on their own special brand of idealism, then packaged this vision compellingly on film, in turn reshaping the values, traditions and archetypes of the country itself.

Branch--who has served on the staffs of the Washington Monthly, Harpers and Esquire and who lives in Baltimore with his family--also won praise for his work showing how a young black Baptist minister helped to reshape America.

Tracking King from his earliest days through his dealings with the Kennedys in the White House and his emergence as undisputed spokesman of the civil rights movement, “Parting the Waters” offers a revealing portrait of a sophisticated man chafing against his own heritage.

But Derrick Bell, a Harvard University law professor, argued in a Times review that the book’s real strength is that it goes beyond a portrait of King to “bring on stage a host of courageous figures who truly believed that racial justice could be achieved through forthright action taken at personal risk.”

Weldon lives in London with her husband and family. She was born in England and grew up in New Zealand. She holds a master’s degree in economics and psychology but switched careers to write film scripts, plays, short stories and novels. Her previous books include “The Hearts and Lives of Men,” “The Shrapnel Academy,” “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” “Praxis,” “Watching Me Watching You” and “Down Among the Women.”

Biography winner Wolff also wrote the short novel “The Barracks Thief,” which won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award, and two highly acclaimed collections of short stories, “Back in the World” and “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.” He has held Guggenheim and Wallace Stegner fellowships and twice has received National Endowment for the Arts awards. He teaches at Syracuse University and lives with his family in upstate New York.

Hall, who also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The One Day,” is poet laureate of New Hampshire and the author of numerous books of prose. He taught English at the University of Michigan from 1957-75. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, poet Jane Kenyon.

Frans de Waal--a citizen of the Netherlands and a U.S. resident since 1981--trained in ethology in the Netherlands. He is now a research scientist with the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center. He wrote “Chimpanzee Politics.”

The Times has awarded its Book Prizes annually since 1980. Main responsibility for naming finalists and winners in categories other than the Kirsch Award rests with six committees of three judges each, all of whom remain anonymous. Most are widely published writers; none are Times employees. Selection of the Kirsch winner is made by a single anonymous judge each year.