1990 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE NOMINEES : for the publishing year August 1, 1989 through July 31, 1990

BIOGRAPHY

A FIRST-CLASS TEMPERAMENT; The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row)

Meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt shortly after his ascension to the Presidency in 1933, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described him as “a second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.” This second volume of Ward’s lively and psychologically revealing biography begins with his honeymoon abroad in 1905 and concludes with his election as Governor of New York in 1928. Ward’s portrait provides a balance to the well-known characterization of Roosevelt as a “gregarious, graceful and ebullient man.” Here he is revealed also as a “consummate actor,” a trait which, for all the damage it often wreaks, served him well in coping with the devastation of poliomyelitis.

THE IRON LADY; A Biography of Margaret Thatcher by Hugo Young (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The central riddle revealed here is why, as a woman in a man’s world, Margaret Thatcher evinces such an exclusionary attitude toward women. The British Prime Minister’s stance stems from her “barely tolerant” childhood view of her mother juxtaposed with the idolization of her father. From her father, Young argues, she inherited a “joyless earnestness” that combined with her early interest in science to produce the roots of her public character. “She did not ponder problems; she wanted solutions. . . . Political intellectuals interested her to the extent that they offered solutions.” The author, whose career as a political columnist has coincided with Thatcher’s as political leader, describes two qualities that are her greatest strengths: her “sense of moral rectitude” and her political intuition.

MEANS OF ASCENT; The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Pulitizer Prize-winning author’s second book in a projected four-volume work on the life of one of our most complex presidents. It is a dark and unrelenting portrayal of the way in which the humiliation of sudden poverty at age 13 led to Lyndon Johnson’s quest for power at nearly any cost. More importantly, this painstakingly documented account also unflinchingly reveals the corrupt relationship between ends and means in American political life. The author, a former investigative journalist, was able to elicit untapped recollections from Johnson’s old cronies. One of the most dramatic passages is an analysis of the mysterious 1948 senatorial contest that Johnson at his most desperate managed to win by the “87 votes that changed history.”

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR; A Biography by Deirdre Bair (Summit Books)

Deirdre Bair commenced the research for this book with two questions: “How could that well-brought-up little Catholic girl have found the courage to become the fearless, free-spirited adult who gave as good as she got in the often vicious arena of Paris intellectualism? And as for ‘The Second Sex,’ from what place within her creative consciousness had that book come?” It took the author, recipient of the National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett, seven years to answer these questions. The product is by turns literary biography, intellectual history, feminist theory and oral history.

THE FIVE OF HEARTS; An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 by Patricia O’Toole (Clarkson N. Potter/Crown)

An intimate, gossipy, yet graceful and well-researched social history of an elite group of influential Americans who first came together in Washington, D.C., in the winter of 1880-1881 as privileged bons vivants needing an appreciative outlet for their unconventional energies, ideas and wit. The social circle was composed of Henry Adams, historian and descendant of presidents; his wife, Clover; Secretary of State John Hay and his wife, Clara; Clarence King, geologist, leader of the great Fortieth Parallel survey. Often compared to the Bloomsbury group, the fivesome dubbed themselves “The Five of Hearts.” Although intimates, they kept to themselves their most intriguing secrets (King, considered a bachelor, at his death was discovered to have left behind a black common-law wife and five children). Their “little White House” gatherings at the Lafayette Square home of the Adamses included Presidents from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, along with other such influential figures as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie.

CURRENT INTEREST

DISAPPEARING THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT; Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Jr. (Viking)

A startlingly original examination of change in modern culture and what it bodes for the future of human values. “Is the idea of what it is to be human disappearing, along with so many other ideas, through the modern skylight?” Hardison asks. He reviews the ways in which central concepts in five basic interrelated areas--nature, history, language, art and human evolution--”no longer seem to objectify a real world. It is as though progress were making the real world invisible.” People who have made the transition across this “horizon of invisibility,” he explains, put their experience not into familiar words and images but into symbols that cannot be understood by those who have not yet made the transition to modern culture--thus, another “disappearance.”

THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR; Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath by Kevin Phillips (Random House)

This highly readable book could serve as a wake-up button. Political analyst Kevin Phillips draws a convincing portrait of the new political economics as a deliberate quest to intensify oppression of the poor while fostering unprecedented growth of upper-bracket wealth. Directly related are the growth of federal debt, global economic realignment, foreigners devouring large chunks of American real estate, and “the meaninglessness of being a millionaire in an era with nearly a hundred thousand ‘decamillionaires.’ ” His supporting data are as persuasive as his main point: that a Populist backlash in the 1990s is both needed and inevitable.

DISTURBING THE PEACE; A Conversation With Karel Hvizdala by Vaclav Havel translated by Paul Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf)

“The history of this book has been marked by history itself,” says the preface. Indeed. The “conversation” from exile that forms this book is actually a set of prescient answers to carefully wrought questions posed through underground mail to the rebel playwright three years before the startling events that would lead to Havel’s election as president of Czechoslovakia. The changed context provides an ironic gift for the reader. On the eve of his 50th birthday, Havel remembers the political and literary battles of his youth, his involvement in the Prague Spring of 1968, what it is to be an artist under constant surveillance and harassment by the police, the years of imprisonment and his involvement in the civic struggle to bring moral responsibility back into his country’s public life.

MY TRAITOR’S HEART; A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan (A Morgan Entrekin Book/ Atlantic Monthly Press)

As a member of the white master tribe of South Africa, the author grew up thinking himself a “Just White Man.” Then he took a job as a police reporter and the truth about the fear and violence in his homeland set in. He fled to America in 1977 and remained in exile for eight years, contemplating his country and his family, which included both white and black relatives linked by secret ties of blood. Finally, he decided to go back to seek the truth, which became the motivating force for this book: “I had always been two people, you see . . . A Just White Man appalled by the cruelties Afrikaners inflicted on Africans, and an Afrikaner appalled by the cruelties Africans inflicted on each other and might one day inflict on us. There were always these two paths open before me, these two forces tugging at my traitor’s heart.”

THE LONG GRAY LINE; The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 by Rick Atkinson (Houghton Mifflin)

As tensions continue in the Middle East, we might all benefit from this splendid book by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Rick Atkinson. “The Long Gray Line” is a long, poignant reminder of the sad cost of war. In haunting prose, Atkinson chronicles the pain and stoicism of the families, and especially the boys, of the West Point Class of 1966. And boys they were, teen-agers too young for the exercise of informed free will, yet sent on missions to Vietnam that many would later consider immoral. This story of West Point, where the “rage for order” transforms frightened boys into cadets “eager to fight,” is a metaphor for the larger national, generational and political schism that left us all wiser.

HISTORY

AWASH IN A SEA OF FAITH; The Christianization of the American People, 1550-1865 by Jon Butler (Harvard University Press)

Despite what our cultural mythology has taught us, Puritanism in early America was not the single major force that shaped our religious values; instead, from the time Europeans began settling New England, American religious life was complex and eclectic. Yale professor Butler approaches his subject by emphasizing religious beliefs and practices, rather than the formal institutions and the elites who run them. As a result, we learn that what most early American believers had in common was their desire to begin anew and to create their own religion, which most often consisted of a quest for direct access to salvation and to the supernatural.

A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE; Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 by David Fromkin (Henry Holt)

A panoramic view that attempts to explain the modern Middle East since the end of the Ottoman Empire, when the Allies divvied up the area without much regard for the religious sensibilities inseparable from nationhood in this part of the world. “The Middle East, as we know it from today’s headlines, emerged from decisions made by the Allies during and after the First World War,” Fromkin writes. Boundary lines for the new Middle East were arbitrarily drawn on “an empty map” without any input from the leaders of those countries themselves, says the author of this carefully researched book based on recently opened archival material.

THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA; by Jonathan D. Spence (W. W. Norton)

A passionately told epic of China by Yale professor and historian Spence, author of eight other acclaimed works on China. His not-surprising contention is that in order to come to terms with China today we need to know about its past. The author’s dilemma was where to begin in a recorded history that spans 4,000 years. He decided on 1600 because from that point on there is a continuity in customs and practices, meaning that the presence of the past can be seen. A “modern” nation, according to Spence, is one that “is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies, new ideas.” Defined in this way, modern countries existed centuries ago; yet, he emphasizes, never has China been one of them.

THE QUEST FOR EL CID; by Richard Fletcher (Alfred A. Knopf)

An illuminating tale of the life and times of Rodrigo Diaz, the 11th-Century Spanish aristocrat-soldier commonly known as El Cid. Spain’s first great national hero emerges as a timeless character motivated by the quest for fortune, which he unabashedly sought by whatever bloody means were required. By the time of his death in 1099, he had become the independent ruler of a principality and the most famous man in Iberia, which accounts for his legendary presence in heroic tales to this day. In the masterful account of the old hero, Richard Fletcher has both clarified and verified previous research by others.

ITALY AND ITS MONARCHY; by Denis Mack Smith (Yale University Press)

A densely packed account of the inner workings of the Italian monarchy, which existed only from 1861 until 1946 (under the reign of only four kings), yet exerted considerable impact on Italian history--much of it havoc-producing. Written by one of the world’s leading historians of Italy, it “assesses the kings’ influence on the slow and uneven progress of Italian parliamentary government, on an adventurous foreign policy that Italy could not afford, on the controversial decision to enter the two world wars, and on the authoritarian-nationalist experiment of fascism.”

FICTION

FRIEND OF MY YOUTH; by Alice Munro (Alfred A. Knopf)

Powerful and haunting short stories. Munro’s characters inhabit sparse Canadian landscapes; they are straightforward and refuse to feel sorry for themselves. Their wisdom is quietly ingested, their goodness revealed only through decent living. Yet the price they pay for their quiet dignity causes a catch in the reader’s throat. Tragedy and mystery surround these characters who have no resources for the struggle against evil. As one of them says, “You either trust or you don’t trust, in my opinion. When you decide you’re going to trust, you have to start where you are.”

REACHING TIN RIVER; by Thea Astley (G. P. Putnam’s Sons)

Sprawling Australia is the setting for heroine Belle, a fortyish divorcee, the love-child of uncommitted 1960s parents, who passionately seeks the order and logic she discovered in Euclidean geometry. Belle’s own life is shiftless until she chances upon a turn-of-the-century photograph of Gaden Lockyer, an obscure local dignitary with an interesting face and a shady past. She becomes obsessed with moving backward in time to Lockyer’s native Tin River, where she occasionally sees his phantom image. In his diaries she finds mention of his inexplicable sighting of her--or does she? So successful is this story of Belle’s loosened grip on reality that we long for her fantasy ourselves and ache with loss when Belle’s story ends.

LANTERN SLIDES; by Edna O’Brien (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A superb new collection of stories that continue the theme of tragedy that intrigues Edna O’Brien. The book’s epigraph by Thomas Mann--”Each human life must work through all the joys and sorrows, gains and losses, which make up the history of the world”--is a theme that reverberates throughout her stories. There isn’t a human situation she shrinks from, whether it is the revulsion of a sister when her brother-lover takes a wife or the self-destruction of a woman obsessed with a married lover. The title story is the collection’s masterpiece.

ORDINARY LOVE AND GOOD WILL; Two Novellas by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf)

Two novellas that explore the hidden territory of marriage and the price that must be paid for the choices we make. In “Ordinary Love,” 52-year-old Rachel Kinsella’s current contentment with her life was gained at a cost to her children and herself that is only now being tallied 20 years after a brief mindless affair, the catalyst for the loss of her snug family. Until this summer’s reunion with her children, Rachel had not understood what it was that made her commit the grand act of self-destruction--or was it self-preservation?--that cast her out. Now she sees that her husband’s enthrallment with his family was actually the passion of an egomaniac. Perfect happiness, she concludes, “must be accompanied by the inevitable pain of knowing it cannot last.”

BAOTOWN; by Wang Anyi translated by Martha Avery (W. W. Norton)

This simple, powerful, engaging prose (translated from the Chinese) is the work of a young writer who at 16 was sent away from her family for eight years to a poverty-stricken northern province of China to fulfill the Cultural Revolutionary requirement of intellectuals. Wang Anyi transformed the experience into funny and warm stories of the completely human characters that make up the fictional “Baotown.”

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

SONORAN DESERT SUMMER; by John Alcock illustrated by Marilyn Hoff Stewart (The University of Arizona Press)

Scientific voyeur Alcock has devoted his professional life to the study of desert insect behavior. At the “little mountain” an hour’s drive from Phoenix, he pursues his fascination with the miniature desert life that is the subject of his latest book. “Ironically,” he writes, “it is the extreme hostility of the climate that is responsible for the exotic and intriguing nature of the desert’s biology.”

GREEN RAGE; Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization by Christopher Manes (Little, Brown)

With unabashed partisanship and a brash tone, law student and Earth First! member Christopher Manes communicates the roots, rationale and methods of radical environmentalism. Here is the story behind the daredevil defenders of nature who employ attention-grabbing--and often illegal--tactics such as driving spikes into trees in order to shatter loggers’ saws. The premise, of course, is hard to argue with: The earth is in dire danger. The point of the movement--and of this book--seems to be that in any struggle, somebody must challenge the status quo by taking the extreme position.

PATENTING THE SUN; Polio and the Salk Vaccine by Jane S. Smith (William Morrow)

Mention the word “polio” and people born before 1950 will emotionally recall the summers of their youth when parents were too frightened to let children swim in public pools or attend movies. The worst epidemic in U.S. history occurred in 1952, when 60,000 new cases were reported. This intriguing social history of polio in the United States recounts the quest to develop the vaccine that in 1955 dramatically ended those anxious summers.

DISCOVERING; by Robert Scott Root-Bernstein (Harvard University Press)

A fictional approach to unveiling the discovery process. At a colloquium to debate the issues that lie at the core of scientific creativity, six characters ask themselves: Is there a structure to the process of discovering? Who discovers? What kinds of obstacles must discoverers overcome? And what can be done to foster discovery? Predictions are made: Great inventions and discoveries will take place in countries having expanding economies and which accommodate mavericks; mavericks will most likely be trained at new and peripheral institutions or will work in emerging fields.

THE CONTROL OF NATURE; by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Three long essays by one of America’s finest nature writers defy our notion of natural order: It is not nature, even in its worst rages, that is out of control, but rather human beings who are out of control in their obsessive efforts to control nature. When a subject commands McPhee’s attention, he engages fully in respectful observation. When he writes, he brings poetical description to the previously ordinary. Especially compelling for the Southern Californian is McPhee’s essay on Los Angeles’ debris flows: “The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. . . . The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal endlessly blinking.”

POETRY

WHAT LIGHT THERE IS; And Other Poems . by Eamon Grennan (North Point Press)

Light in these lyrical, meditative poems illuminates the classical themes of poetry--nature, family, love and the contentedness of an uncluttered life. These themes act as a counterpoint to anxiety, the knowledge of how “our lives hang on balances too delicate to ponder for long.” Moments of satisfaction come, as in the poem, “Accidents,” when “I’m all at once all there” or in “Fall,” when “On a still morning the shallow pond / Is full of kissing: little narcissi . . . “

THE COLOR OF MESABI BONES; by John Caddy (Milkweed Editions)

A searing collection of poems and prose poems that describe surviving a childhood of violence. Often framed in the third person, their impact is the more powerful for showing us the effects rather than the perpetration of violence: “The boy is dreaming in the dark / a metronomic sound that punctuates the night with glares of sullen red / It is, slow and strong / the sound of one hand slapping some boundary of meat.” These are poems that attempt to reach back decades to assuage the pain now and to understand: “The doctor slides the X-rays from manila. . . . An X-ray syndrome . . . shaken child . . . we can’t be sure of course.”

GRACE NOTES; by Rita Dove (W. W. Norton)

This fourth collection of poetry by the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry is inspired by events in Dove’s childhood. Her images are captivating: “ant-freckled stones” and “exhausted wives hovering over bins of frozen pork.” Her poetry is full of lines that can be held and turned over and over like a smooth, comforting stone: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery” or “Here’s a riddle for Our Age: When the sky’s the limit, how can you tell you’ve gone too far?” or “The Island Women move through Paris / as if they had just finished inventing their destinations . . . better not look an island woman in the eye--unless you like feeling unnecessary.”

GOING BACK TO THE RIVER; by Marilyn Hacker (Vintage)

Marilyn Hacker has been the recipient of the National Book Award. Her rhyming poetry, which springs from her feminist sensibilities, is playful, wisecracking, erotic and devoid of pretense. These compelling poems are about love, loss and relationships, in which she combines openness and technical mastery of conventional poetic forms.

LEAVING ANOTHER KINGDOM; by Gerald Stern (Harper & Row)

A large collection that spans 15 years, with allusions to philosophers, artists and other poets. “Another Insane Devotion” is one of the most moving poems in the collection: “Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms / we were dying together / we never met again / although she was pregnant when I left her--I have a daughter or son somewhere / darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio.”