L.A.’s Rappleye wins book prize

Los Angeles author Charles Rappleye, a former writer and editor at the L.A. Weekly, has won the third annual $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for his biography “Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution.”

The book, which sheds light on how controversial slavery was in this country long before the Civil War, covers 100 years, from the birth in 1736 of John Brown, a robber baron who ran slave ships from Providence, R.I., to the 1836 death of Moses, the younger brother, who with slave blood on his hands became an abolitionist. The brothers founded Brown University.