Finalists for the 1990-1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

BIOGRAPHY

SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Edwin Haviland Miller (University of Iowa Press). America’s first great storyteller discouraged biography; the traits that can be observed in an artist, he wrote, “hide the man, instead of displaying him.” Readers looking for insights into their favorite author, Nathaniel Hawthorne believed, would be better off looking “through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil.” Such is author Edwin Miller’s accomplishment in this masterful portrait of the confluence of life, art and place.

A PROPHET WITH HONOR: The Billy Graham Story by William Martin (Quill/William Morrow). The forces that shaped this charismatic evangelist have shaped many Americans: Puritan origins, strict upbringing based on rigid behavioral rules enforced by physical punishment, parents in possession of an unwavering sense of being right about all things; all of it tempered with strong parental love. A hyperactive child, Billy Graham might predictably have been treated harshly in such an environment; instead he was regarded with a transcendent understanding by his family, particularly by his remarkable mother. His oratorical gift surfaced early and was nurtured by a host of mentors, including his family. Untainted by scandal despite his high profile in the scandal-ridden evangelical movement, uncorrupted by power despite his affiliations with the powerful, Graham came to be perceived by many as a prophet.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: Volume One 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook (Viking Penguin). This boldly revisionist view of a complex woman, based on recently opened archives, shows how the First Lady found love and political authority despite experiencing extreme betrayal.

EDGAR A. POE: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance by Kenneth Silverman (HarperCollins). This first comprehensive Poe biography in English in half a century goes beyond the popular conception of Poe as a debauchee. Through a lively and compelling narrative, Silverman skeptically reexamines the old evidence from a modern sensibility that incorporates a psychological perspective, such as the role that childhood bereavement played in Poe’s creative output.

FASCINATING RHYTHM by Deena Rosenberg (New American Library/Dutton). An interpretive and critical history that sheds light on how two brothers who were temperamental opposites managed to collaborate on songs and shows that became both art and social history. This social biography of George and Ira Gershwin provides detailed analyses of the Gershwins’ vocabulary, voice, subject matter and viewpoint.

CURRENT INTEREST

CULTURE WARS: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter (Basic Books) . Americans are at war with one another over issues ranging from abortion to arts funding and gay rights. Describing the fight between Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics at one extreme and secularists, reform Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestants at the other, “Culture Wars” shows that at its core, the battle is over fundamental assumptions about truth, freedom and national identity.

CHAIN REACTION: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall (W. W. Norton & Company) . A candid and insightful analysis of how the Democratic party began to decline during the “rights revolution” of 1972. Taking the party far to the left of its previous platforms, the revolution advocated nothing less than the redistribution of power and cultural authority in the United States.

THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN by Francis Fukuyama (The Free Press) . The author whose 1989 essay audaciously asked whether history had “ended” with communism’s collapse here expands on that question. Two powerful forces have shaped human history, he argues: the “logic of modern science” and the “struggle for recognition.” Over time, Fukuyama argues, these forces lead to the collapse of tyrannies and the establishment of capitalist liberal democracies as the result of the historical process. The great question then becomes whether man can be completely satisfied in the stable society that has evolved or whether the spiritual condition of this “last man” in history, deprived of outlets for his ambition for mastery, will lead him to plunge back into bloodshed.

DEN OF THIEVES by James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster). “Violations of securities laws are not victimless crimes,” Wall Street Journal reporter and editor James Stewart argues in this complete narrative of the events that led to the insider-trading scandal and to the unprecedented security scams perpetrated by Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel and Dennis Levine.

THE LADY & THE MONK: Four Seasons in Kyoto by Pico Iyer (Alfred A. Knopf). A look at the old Japan and the new through the briefly intersecting lives of a young Englishman who took up residence in a Japanese monastery to learn about Zen Buddhism and a bourgeois young Japanese housewife trying to break out of an arranged marriage and an arranged life. The cross-cultural collisions that result from their mutual attraction are poignant, funny, tender, enlightening and sexually charged.

FICTION

TIME AND TIDE by Edna O’Brien (Farrar Straus Giroux). Edna O’Brien depicts the powerful emotions of divorce and motherhood through her main character, Nell, a dabbler in drugs, bohemia and life. Tending to drift rather than set a course, Nell enters into disastrous relationships with men and finds herself rejected by her children. Then tragedy strikes. Through O’Brien’s strong hallucinatory prose, we experience Nell’s loss and her eventual summoning of the will to continue.

LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD and Other Stories by Randall Kenan (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). A collection of arrestingly powerful short stories narrated by strong Southern regional voices, some documented with “foot-noted” mini-stories describing “histories” of oppression. It is in the title story that Kenan plays with scholarship and oral history to spin a tall tale of the founding of Tims Creek involving escaped slaves, a Yoruba chieftain, a drunken Dixie senator, a homosexual botanist and legions of the dead.

MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon Books). Writer and artist Art Spiegelman continues the story of the character Artie Spiegelman, who is trying to reconstruct in cartoon form the lives of his father, Vladek, and his mother, Anja, both survivors of Auschwitz. The Jews are portrayed as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs and the Swedes as reindeer to create a distancing effect that allows us to follow the fable without being overcome by its grimness.

A THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf). This is the world of a thriving Iowa farm in 1979: one thousand acres--unencumbered and unmortgaged--of the richest, flattest, most arable land on earth. It has been in the family for four generations, providing not only the family’s sustenance but also its self-definition. Now, however, proud family patriarch Larry Cook unexpectedly decides to retire and turn over his valuable holdings to his three daughters, a decision that proves to be the first in an unfolding of events that will dismember the farm, distancing father from daughters, sister from sister and husband from wife, and revealing family truths that allow no forgiveness.

DAUGHTERS by Paule Marshall (Atheneum). Protagonist Ursa Mackenzie is a young professional African-American woman making a life and career for herself in New York. She is of dual heritage: American through her mother, a former schoolteacher from Connecticut, and Caribbean through her father, a leading politician on the island of Triunion. Central to the story is an abortion that helps Ursa break the dependency on her father, a charismatic man who subtly seduces and dominates her.

ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD (For First Fiction)

MARINE LIFE by Linda Svendsen (Farrar Straus Giroux). For Adele, one of the protagonists in these interrelated stories, shedding insecurity is the hardest challenge of life. To do so requires trust and love, a frightening leap of faith for one accustomed to living without a safety net of emotional support. Dealing with the struggle to accept love without contaminating it, these spare, funny and engaging stories resonate with promise.

1959 by Thulani Davis (Grove Weidenfeld). “In the winter of 1959, eight black college students, wearing suits and ties and fresh haircuts, went into the local Woolworth’s and sat down at the lunch counter . . . .” This snippet from contemporary history provides the context for Davis’ free-verse first-person novel about how the citizens of Turner, Va., reacted to a simple but radical historical act that changed America.

HIGH COTTON by Daryl Pinckney (Farrar, Straus Giroux). The upper-middle-class blacks--Pinckney calls them “nice Negroes” and “upper shadies”--at the center of this first novel are obsessed with light skin and good hair. Through selected episodes and reflections, Pinckney’s protagonist explores ways of being black (including black militancy, black separatism and even black escapism in Paris), but eventually we realize that these are all simply masks for a man whose image has become so important that he has lost touch with his own authenticity.

SHE’S COME UNDONE by Wally Lamb (Pocket Books). An epic novel of survival showing how the wise-cracking, vulnerable Dolores Price, who has been raped, abused and abandoned, now must extricate herself from bingeing and obesity.

AFTER MOONDOG by Jane Shapiro (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). “In July 1965, wearing new sandals, blind to life’s possibilities, I met the boy who would immediately become my husband, while we were standing at Fifty-fourth and Sixth talking to Moondog. It was early evening and the sky was full of light.” So begins this first novel about marriage, duplicity, parents, children and sex during an time period stretching from Vietnam to Reagan.

HISTORY

OWEN LATTIMORE AND THE “LOSS” OF CHINA by Robert P. Newman (UC Press). In March, 1950, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar at Johns Hopkins University, of being “the top Soviet espionage agent in the U.S.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee exonerated Lattimore four months later, but for years afterward he was hounded by the Senate Internal Security Committee. When China, our ally in World War II, took on the cause of the “enemy,” communism, somebody had to be blamed, and Lattimore seemed a good target. A reminder of our country’s capacity for ideological madness, this book is also a riveting narrative of the McCarthy era.

BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism by Alexander Stille (Summit/Simon Schuster). A carefully researched re-creation of Mussolini’s Italy--a time characterized by benevolence and betrayal, persecution and rescue--told through the personal stories of five Jewish families: a northern Italian family who prospered under Mussolini; a family whose children included both an anti-fascist activist and a Fascist Party member; a family struggling to survive in the ghetto; a family working underground to shelter Jews from the Nazis; and a family of half-Jews who are forced to work in an Italian concentration camp.

FRONTIERS: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noel Mostert (Alfred A. Knopf). A 1,200-plus-page history of the prolonged, agonized and morally ambiguous collision between white and European worlds, from the initial, stunned contacts between shipwrecked sailors and black inhabitants to the imprisonment of the last Xhosa tribal chiefs.

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics by Greg Mitchell (Random House). In the throes of the Great Depression of 1934 when millions of Americans were out of work and becoming impatient with Roosevelt’s New Deal, California voters turned to an unlikely candidate for governor: Upton Sinclair, muckraking author of “The Jungle” and a lifelong Socialist. Support for his EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform had won him the Democratic nomination by a landslide. Terrified Republicans mounted a media campaign against him that premiered the use of movie-making to demolish a candidate.

TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDY: A History of the Mexican People by Ramon Eduardo Ruiz (W. W. Norton & Company). An outstandingly well-crafted narrative study of Mexico’s tumultuous origin and development--from its Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan heritage to its present incarnation as a dependent and struggling modern country. The author, a distinguished Mexico scholar, characterizes the country’s history as “one long tragedy intermittently punctuated by triumph.”

POETRY

THE WILD IRIS by Louise Gluck (The Ecco Press). Written during a 10-week period in the summer of 1991, this new collection of poems chronicles an impassioned and direct exchange among a god who “discloses virtually nothing,” human beings who “leave signs of feeling everywhere” and a garden where “whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.”

THE FATHER: Poems by Sharon Olds (Alfred A. Knopf). A daughter’s vision of a father’s illness and death, including reflections on the years after his death: “I had not known him. My father had dignity. At the end of his life it began to wake in me.”

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: Poems 1988-1991 by Adrienne Rich (W. W. Norton & Company). “This is no place you ever knew me,” writes Adrienne Rich in this new work. “ . . . These are not the roads / you knew me by.” She is alluding to the new territory in which she has mapped a truer way for us to see the world, a way that begins with writing “from the marrow of our bones.”

BREAD WITHOUT SUGAR: Poems by Gerald Stern (W. W. Norton & Company). This eighth volume of poetry by Gerald Stern begins in an angry past and evolves into a series of tributes and meditative odes.

SUB ROSA by Susan Prospere (W. W. Norton & Company). A graceful debut volume that expresses the recollections and longings of children and adults engaged in a struggle for survival.

SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY

THE THIRD CHIMPANZEE: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond (HarperCollins). An important and provocative exploration of what makes us human. Whatever sets us apart, it is contained in less than 2% of our genes, since more than 98% of our genetic makeup is identical to that of chimpanzees. And yet, what is it that has led us to found religions and civilizations, develop languages, travel in space? And what has given us the capacity to destroy all our achievements overnight? Drawing on a wide range of recent scientific studies, including his own research in “primitive” human societies, Jared Diamond traces humankind’s biological and social development and speculates on its future.

CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED by Daniel C. Dennett (Little, Brown and Company). In a new model of consciousness based on recent developments in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence, Dennett explores the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the qualities of experiential states, the nature of self or ego and its relation to thoughts and sensations, and the level of consciousness of non-human creatures.

THE LEFT-HANDER SYNDROME: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness by Stanley Coren (The Free Press). A pioneering and accessible summary of current scientific research into sidedness. Left-handedness does have social, educational, medical and psychological implications, such as the tendency to suffer more from a variety of physical and psychological problems and the ability to be more intelligent and creative in some spheres.

ARTIFICIAL LIFE: The Quest for a New Creation by Steven Levy (Pantheon Books). The intriguing story of how computer scientists, microbiologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and evolutionary theorists have succeeded in creating creatures that look and act very much like living organisms. They grow, eat, reproduce, mutate, fight with each other, die--and do all this spontaneously, without interference or help from their human creators. This is also the story of a new way of practicing science: not in the laboratory but on the computer. Scientists thus can move beyond life-as-we-know-it to life-as-it-could-be.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT: New Theories About the Sun and the Search for Dark Matter by John Gribbin (Harmony Books). Scientists have been understanding the nature of our nearest star, the sun, at an astonishing pace. Many of their findings are reported here: e.g., “starquakes” that rock the sun and reveal as much about its interior as earthquakes do about the Earth. Solar research, Gribbin explains, may eventually help scientists discover the missing “cold dark matter” in the universe, which would provide the gravitational mass that astrophysicists believe is needed to keep the universe from expanding forever.