L.A. Times Honors 10 Authors at Book Fest

The tale of George Washington’s painful awakening to the evils of slavery was awarded the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history Saturday night.

“An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America” by historian Henry Wiencek traces Washington’s transformation from slave-owning planter who bought, sold and whipped his chattel to military general who saw how effectively free black soldiers fought for the Continental Army. Not until the end of his life, however, did the nation’s first president write a will that ultimately freed his 124 slaves.

“With rare sensitivity,” the judges said, “Wiencek enables us to see just how difficult it was for Washington to extricate himself from the peculiar institution at the heart of Southern society.”

Wiencek said much still needs to be known about the history of race in the United States. “It has been too painful and too complicated for people....So much about slavery has been hidden or oppressed. But there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Wiencek received the prize from California state librarian emeritus Kevin Starr at the 24th annual Times Book Prize awards at Royce Hall. The ceremony was part of this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, marking its ninth year at UCLA.

The $1,000 prizes honor excellence in nine categories, including biography, fiction, poetry, science and technology. The winners are selected by a panel of three writers of distinction in each genre.

Ishmael Reed, an African American poet, novelist, songwriter and playwright, received the Robert Kirsch Award for “Blues City: A Walk in Oakland,” which The Times called “a provocative mix of literary memoir, revisionist history, amateur urbanology and red-hot political manifesto.”

“These are the best times for American writers and readers,” Reed said.

Named for The Times’ literary critic from 1954 to 1980, the Kirsch prize is a 10th award given annually to honor an author who writes about the American West.

Pete Dexter won the fiction prize for “Train,” his sixth novel, which judges said “is as visceral as a knife blade to the throat.” Dexter soared to prominence with “Paris Trout,” winner of the 1988 National Book Award. In “Train,” set in 1950s Southern California, the judges said Dexter uses “his deft and idiosyncratic style” to open “a bipolar moral universe” involving a black caddy and a sheriff’s sergeant.

The biography prize was awarded to Neil Smith for his portrait of Isaiah Bowman, an American geographer who advised presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman on the geopolitical mapping of U.S. interests in the new worlds that would emerge from the 20th century’s two great wars.

“American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization” is the fruit of 20 years of research.

It sheds light on the struggles to reshape Europe and much of the Middle East, beginning with the collapse of the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov empires early in the last century.

Smith writes that Bowman warned in 1944 that making Palestine a Jewish state without the support of the majority Arab population would come “at great cost in blood and money.”

The Art Seidenbaum Award for first work of fiction went to British writer Mark Haddon for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” whose unique story of an autistic teenager’s search for the killer who took a pitchfork to a neighbor’s poodle has ridden the nation’s bestseller lists since its release last summer.

And in a repeat performance, George P. Pelecanos won for best mystery or thriller, this time for “Soul Circus,” his fourth book to feature private eye Derek Strange, a lover of ‘70s soul music who chases killers and drug dealers on the rough streets of the nation’s capital.

The novel not only confronts “the racial divide in urban America” and “the nature of evil and the meaning of life,” the judges said, it also “is about as close to perfect as a mystery novel can get and, therefore, merits the extraordinary decision to award George Pelecanos the mystery/thriller prize two years in a row.”

The poetry prize went to Anthony Hecht for “Collected Later Poems,” an assemblage of 25 years of work.

Philip J. Hilts received the science and technology prize for his “taut, compelling” history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and its handling of a century’s worth of problems, including the tobacco wars, monitoring of the nation’s blood supplies, poisonings by untested pharmaceuticals and the issue of unregulated herbal medicines.

“With restrained moral outrage,” the judges said, Hilts demonstrates in “Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and 100 Years of Regulation” that “little has changed in industry rhetoric over that century.”

Journalist and Asia scholar Ross Terrill drew the prize for current-interest nonfiction for “The New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States,” an analysis of a conflicted China, where tradition competes with its people’s desires for a modern nation-state.

The prize for best young adult fiction went to Jennifer Donnelly for “A Northern Light,” a story set against the backdrop of a 1906 murder that explores the psychological chains imposed on people by poverty, ignorance and racism.