Honor roll:Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest

Parting the Waters: Volume 1 of America in the King Years, 1954-1963

Taylor Branch

• 1989 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• 1989 Pulitzer–History winner
• 1988 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
• Score: 30.39

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King’s rise to greatness and illuminates the…

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Samantha Power

• 2003 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
• 2002 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
• 2002 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• Score: 26.53

A character-driven study of some of the darkest moments in our national history, when America failed to prevent or stop 20th-century campaigns to exterminate Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans .

Drawing upon declassified cables, private papers, exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy-makers, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Samantha Power tells the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of the worst massacres of the twentieth century.

In this masterful work of social…

Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

Frances FitzGerald

• 2000 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• 2001 Pulitzer–History finalist
• 2000 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
• Score: 22.5

Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prize­winning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century.

Reagan’s presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still—yet he seemed nothing more than a charming,…

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

Richard Kluger

• 1997 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
• 1996 LATimes–History finalist
• 1996 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
• 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist*
• Score: 22.47

No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes—mankind’s most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product—with such sweep and enlivening detail. Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process—financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal—are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever…

A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr

• 1995 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
• 1996 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• 1995 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
• Score: 22.45

Two of the nation’s largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything—including his sanity.

A Civil Action is the searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry—one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice. Yet it is also the story of how one man can ultimately make a difference. With an unstoppable narrative power…

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Philip Gourevitch

• 1998 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• 1998 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
• Score: 20.48

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people’s response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.

This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech—largely by machete—it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives…

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anne Fadiman

• 1997 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• 1997 NBCC–Nonfiction winner
• Score: 20.47

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run “Quiet War” in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia’s pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his…

Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White

Joseph Lelyveld

• 1986 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• 1986 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
• Score: 20.36

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number

Jacobo Timerman, Toby Talbot

• 1981 Dagger-Nonfiction winner
• 1981 LATimes–Current Interest winner
• Score: 20.31

The bestselling, classic personal chronicle of the Argentine publisher’s ordeal at the hands of the Argentine government—imprisoned and tortured as a dissenter and as a Jew—that aroused the conscience of the world.

Strange Piece of Paradise

Terri Jentz

• 2007 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• 2006 LATimes–Current Interest finalist
• 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
• Score: 18.57

In the summer of 1977, Terri Jentz and her Yale roommate, Shayna Weiss, make a cross-country bike trip. They pitch a tent in the desert of central Oregon. As they are sleeping, a man in a pickup truck deliberately runs over the tent. He then attacks them with an ax. The horrific crime is reported in newspapers across the country. No one is ever arrested. Both women survive, but Shayna suffers from amnesia, while Terri is left alone with memories of the attack. Their friendship is shattered.

Fifteen years later, Terri returns to the small town where she was nearly murdered, on the first of many visits she will make “to solve the crime that would solve me.”