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Two books and a work in progress have been named winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, an awards program that recognizes superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify the literary grace, the commitment to serious research, and the social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award's namesake. Information about the winners can be found at http://www.lukasprize.org/.
The winners are:
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000): Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner). A tribute to landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the most creative and public-spirited Americans of the 19th century, the book presents an intimate profile of an artist, visionary, practical man of affairs, and scholar of many disciplines.
The prize's jurors, Henry Mayer (All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison & the Abolition of Slavery, which won last year's Lukas Book Prize), Frances FitzGerald (Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War) and A. Scott Berg (Lindbergh) said, "In the spirit of Olmsted the book is well-balanced, unassuming in its manner, and at the same time an original and imaginative work."
The Mark Lynton History Prize($10,000): John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press). Drawing on both American and Japanese sources, the book chronicles the American occupation of Japan. The author examines the "arrogant idealism" of the occupiers, determined to impose democracy and enlist Japan in the Cold War, and the response of the defeated Japanese, wrestling with ancient questions of shame and honor and the multiple meanings of patriotism.
The prize's jurors, Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence), Theodore Rabb (Jacobean Gentlemen: Sir Edwin Sandy 1561-1629) and Geoffrey Ward (The West), called the book "an extraordinary work of history, fresh, authoritative, entertaining and important." The judges cited the book as, "sensitive and scrupulously fair to both sides, understanding of individual cultural differences but wise about humankind, based on exhaustive research and presented with gracefully crafted language, Embracing Defeat exemplifies the qualities so conspicuously present in the work of Tony Lukas."
The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($45,000): James Tobin, Work of the Wind: A Remarkable Family, an Overlooked Genius, and the Race for Flight. The book, which will be published by the Free Press, will profile the Wright brothers, two bicycle merchants from Dayton, Ohio, who, on December 17, 1903 near Kitty Hawk, N.C., brought us flight.
The prize's jurors, Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography), Susan Sheehan (Is There No Place on Earth for Me?) and David Laventhol (publisher and editorial director of Columbia Journalism Review), said, "the book offers ample 'history news,' about the Wright Brothers -- things we thought we knew about them but in fact did not. The writing is as elegant as the research is surprising." Two finalists were also noted: Larry Tye's forthcoming Diaspora, to be published by Dutton Plume Publishing, which will tell the story of Jews who are forever rooted in Israel but no longer need to live there, who are thriving in secular societies around the world while clinging to a core of shared beliefs and practices that define them as Jews, and Elizabeth Gitter's Buried Alive: Laura Bridgman, the Original "Deaf Blind Girl, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which tells the little-known story of Laura Bridgman, internationally-celebrated in the 1840s as the first deaf blind person ever to be educated.
The awards are co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, and are sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands.
The awards will be presented on Saturday, May 6. In addition to the ceremony, the 2000 Lukas Prize Project nonfiction writers conference will be held at the Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and will feature several panels that will address crucial issues confronting nonfiction writers.
The conference will begin on Friday, May 5, with a panel from 6-8 p.m., devoted to J. Anthony Lukas's epic study of Boston's school-busing crisis, Common Ground. Discussion will focus not only on the book itself but on its legacy - - the impact it has wielded, over the nearly 15 years since its publication, and on how the media covers urban crises. Among the Friday night panelists will be Tom Winship, who was the editor of The Boston Globe at the time of the school desegregation controversy; John Kifner, a longtime reporter for The New York Times who covered the story, and members of the families chronicled in Common Ground.
A keynote address will be presented on Saturday, May 6 (from 1:30-2:30 p.m.) by Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Bright Shining Lie. The address follows a morning panel (10 a.m.-noon), to be moderated by the historian Alan Brinkley (American History: A Survey) in which the three Lukas Prize winners will discuss in detail how they came to write their books, as well as the challenges they faced, both intellectual and emotional.
Later Saturday, from 2:30-4:30 p.m. a panel discussion will examine the state of narrative nonfiction writing in books, magazines, and newspapers. The panelists will be Gay Talese, the author of many classic works of narrative nonfiction, including Honor Thy Father, The Kingdom and the Power, and a collection of path-breaking magazine pieces, Fame and Obscurity; A. Scott Berg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Charles Lindbergh, as well as of works on Samuel Goldwyn and Maxwell Perkins; Michael Kelly, a former staff writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine who last fall was named editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Alma Guillermoprieto, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker on Latin America and the author of The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now and Samba; and Jack Hart, managing editor of The Oregonian in Portland and the editor of that newspaper's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning series "The French Fry Connection." The moderator of the panel will be Robert Vare, a former editor at The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone who teaches a course in narrative nonfiction writing at Harvard's Nieman Foundation.
Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project honors and perpetuates the work that distinguished the career of acclaimed journalist and author J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lukas published five epic books, each of which examined a critical fault line in America's social and political landscape by examining individual lives caught up in the havoc of change. A former foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times, Lukas tackled the country's generational conflict in his first book Don't Shoot: We Are Your Children; examined the impact of school desegregation in Common Ground, and told a sweeping tale of class conflict at the turn of the century in Big Trouble, completed just before his death.
Arthur Gelb, author and director of The New York Times College Scholarship Program, and Linda Healey, editor and Mr. Lukas' widow, are co-chairs of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Committee. Its members are Alan Brinkley, author and historian; Ellen Chesler, author and senior fellow, Open Society Institute; Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism; Vartan Gregorian, president, The Carnegie Corporation; Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation; Nicholas Lemann, author and staff writer, The New Yorker; Marion Lynton, Mr. Lynton's widow; author and human rights activist Kati Marton; and author and New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples.
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