The 1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : WINNERS AND FINALISTS

FICTION

WINNER: A Fine Balance. By Rohinton Mistry (Alfred A. Knopf)

Every Man for Himself. By Beryl Bainbridge (Carroll & Graf)

The Ghost Road. By Pat Barker (Dutton)

Ship Fever and Other Stories. By Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton & Co.)

About Schmidt. By Louis Begley (Alfred A. Knopf)

Tree of Heaven. By R.C. Binstock (Soho Press)

Santa Evita. By Tomas Eloy Martinez (Alfred A. Knopf)

Open Heart. By A.B. Yehoshua (Doubleday)

HISTORY

WINNER: Black Sea. By Neal Ascherson (Hill & Wang)

Europe: A History. By Norman Davies (Oxford University Press)

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. By Lawrence H. Keeley (Oxford University Press)

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. By Richard Kluger (Alfred A. Knopf)

Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California. By Kevin Starr (Oxford University Press)

William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. By Alan Taylor (Alfred A. Knopf)

BIOGRAPHY

WINNER: Angela’s Ashes. By Frank McCourt (Scribner)

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. By Simon Callow (Viking)

Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. By Lyle Leverich (Crown)

Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography. By Gail Levin (Alfred A. Knopf)

William Morris: A Life for Our Time. By Fiona MacCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)

Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. By Joan Mellen (HarperCollins)

An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. By Hannah Pakula (Simon & Schuster)

A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917, the Painter of Modern Life. By John Richardson (Random House)

CURRENT INTEREST

WINNER: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. By Peter Maass (Alfred A. Knopf)

All God’s Children: The Basket Family and the American Tradition of Violence. By Fox Butterfield (Alfred A. Knopf)

A Civil Action. By Jonathan Harr (Random House)

Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence. By John Hockenberry (Hyperion)

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. By Richard Kluger (Alfred A. Knopf)

Turning Stones: My Days and Nights With Children at Risk. By Marc Parent (Harcourt Brace)

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions. By David Quammen (Scribner)

The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. By Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster)

POETRY

WINNER: Mixed Company. By Alan Shapiro (The University of Chicago Press)

The Terrible Stories. By Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions Limited)

Meadowlands. By Louise Cluck (Ecco Press)

The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994. By Jorie Graham (Ecco Press)

Things That Happen Once. By Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin)

Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected. By Stanley Kunitz (W.W. Norton & Co.)

The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996. By James McMichael (The University of Chicago Press)

The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. By Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Wise Poison. By David Rivard (Graywolf Press)

FIRST FICTION

WINNER: The Smell of Apples. By Mark Behr (St. Martin’s Press)

St. Burl’s Obituary. By Daniel Akst (MacMurray & Beck)

The Secret of the Bulls. By Jose Raul Bernardo (Simon & Schuster)

I Never Came to You in White. By Judith Farr (Houghton Mifflin)

The Debt to Pleasure. By John Lanchester (Henry Holt and Co.)

Resurrection Man. By Eoin McNamee (Picador USA)

I Was Amelia Earhart. By Jane Mendelsohn (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Veracruz Blues. By Mark Winegardner (Viking)

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

WINNER: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. By Carl Sagan (Random House)

Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem. By Amir D. Aczel (Four Walls Eight Windows)

The Most Beautiful Molecule: The Discovery of the Buckyball. By Hugh Aldersey-Williams (John Wiley & Sons Inc.)

The Forgotten Pollinators. By Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan (Island Press/Shearwater)

Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order. By George Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)

Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century. By James Howard Kunstler (Simon & Schuster)

The Dying of the Trees: The Pandemic in America’s Forests. By Charles Little (Viking)