2004 Times Book Prize finalists

Since 1980, the annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have honored literary achievement. The Times presents the awards and sponsors the annual Festival of Books (launched in 1996) as part of a continuing commitment to celebrate the written word. Kenneth Turan, Times film critic and a former books editor for the paper, has directed the Book Prize program since 1995.

The prizes have grown from five awards to 10 and recognize books in categories including fiction, biography, history and science and technology. The Robert Kirsch Award honors a living author whose residence or focus is the American West and whose contributions to American letters merit recognition. The winning authors and the Kirsch Award recipient receive a $1,000 prize. Finalists are listed below.

This year’s award ceremony will be held Friday at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. and will be emceed by Sir Harold Evans. Tickets are $14 and are available from the UCLA central ticket office at (310) 825-2101 or at tickets.ucla.edu. For more information: www.latimes.com/bookprizes.

Robert Kirsch Award

Presented to Tony Hillerman

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Biography

Alexander Hamilton

Ron Chernow

(Penguin)

A portrait of a gifted Founding Father and the newborn nation he helped guide through crises.

Will in the World

How Shakespeare

Became Shakespeare

Stephen Greenblatt

(W.W. Norton)

A young man from the provinces ascends to theatrical greatness in Elizabethan England.

John James

Audubon

The Making of an American

Richard Rhodes

(Alfred A. Knopf)

The private and family life of a master illustrator whose crowning achievement is the multivolume work “The Birds of America.”

De Kooning

An American Master

Mark Stevens and

Annalyn Swan

(Alfred A. Knopf)

The rise of a key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement and his later descent into alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease.

Washington

Gone Crazy

Senator Pat McCarran

and the Great American

Communist Hunt

Michael J. Ybarra

(Steerforth Press)

The extraordinary career of a U.S. senator who wielded

power during the anti-Communist hysteria

of the 1950s.

*

Current Interest

The Spiral Staircase

My Climb Out of Darkness

Karen Armstrong

(Alfred A. Knopf)

The memoir of a preeminent writer on religion, who

describes her troubled years after leaving the convent.

Blue Blood

Edward Conlon

(Riverhead Books)

The author, a fourth-generation New York City police officer, looks back on his encounters with the city in all its turmoil and splendor.

Bound to Please

An Extraordinary

One Volume Literary

Education -- Essays on Great Writers and Their Books

Michael Dirda

(W.W. Norton)

A volume of essays on writers including Herodotus and James Boswell as well as modern masters such as Cormac McCarthy and Joseph Roth.

Truth & Beauty

A Friendship

Ann Patchett

(HarperCollins)

A memoir in praise of a friendship between two writers that spanned 20 years.

Generation Kill

Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War

Evan Wright

(Putnam)

A journalist joins up with an elite Army unit searching for

enemy fighters after the fall of

Baghdad.

*

Fiction

GraceLand

A Novel

Chris Abani

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A young man comes of age in Nigeria during the 1970s and early 1980s.

The Darling

A Novel

Russell Banks

(HarperCollins)

A child of privilege becomes a political radical and flees the U.S. for Africa, where she marries a dictator’s henchman.

Gilead

A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In failing health, an Iowa preacher writes a letter to his 7-year-old son as a way of leaving a record of himself for the boy to consider when he grows up.

The Master

A Novel

Colm Toibin

(Scribner)

Loneliness, hope and despair loom in the life of Henry James after theatrical success eludes him in 1895.

Honored Guest

Stories

Joy Williams

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Lyrical short stories about characters facing their and others’ mortality.

*

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Harbor

A Novel

Lorraine Adams

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Desperation and uncertainty hover over the lives of illegal Algerian immigrants who arrive here hoping for a better life.

Natasha

and Other Stories

David Bezmozgis

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A family of Russian Jews settles in Toronto and the members attempt to reinvent themselves.

Rear View

Stories

Pete Duval

(Mariner Books/Houghton

Mifflin)

Working-class characters wrestle with their fates in these stories set in New England.

Eve Green

A Novel

Susan Fletcher

(W.W. Norton)

A pregnant young woman meditates on her childhood and her mother’s death as she settles down in a quiet rural community in Wales.

A Girl Becomes a

Comma Like That

A Novel

Lisa Glatt

(Simon & Schuster)

Power and vulnerability shift in the lives of the female characters in this novel, as one of them moves home to tend her mother, who is dying of cancer.

*

History

The Coming

of the Third Reich

Richard J. Evans

(Penguin)

A detailed reckoning, full of drama, of the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany.

High Noon in

the Cold War

Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Max Frankel

(Presidio Press/Ballantine

Books)

Drawing on new material, theauthor portrays one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War.

Perilous Times

Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism

Geoffrey R. Stone

(W.W. Norton)

A study of six periods in American history when free speech was repressed.

Beasts of the Field

A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, 1769-1913

Richard Steven Street

(Stanford University Press)

A comprehensive look at California’s agriculture industry and its treatment of migratory farmworkers.

Masquerade

The Life and Times of

Deborah Sampson,

Continental Soldier

Alfred F. Young

(Alfred A. Knopf)

How a woman in disguise served in a Massachusetts regiment during the American Revolution.

*

Mystery/Thriller

Dark Voyage

A Novel

Alan Furst

(Random House)

In 1941, workers in a Lisbon dockyard witness the approach of a rusty tramp steamer that conceals spies working for British intelligence.

The Return of the

Dancing Master

A Novel

Henning Mankell, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson

(New Press)

A Swedish policeman on medical leave investigates the murder of a former colleague, only to find that his old friend was a Nazi.

Old Boys

A Novel

Charles McCarry

(Overlook Press)

A retired CIA spy recruits some former colleagues to help him find a lost cousin, who is a veteran covert agent.

Tijuana Straits

A Novel

Kem Nunn

(Scribner)

A washed-up surfer struggling with his demons helps a woman on the run from danger in the no-man’s land along the Mexican border.

A Question of Blood

An Inspector Rebus Novel

Ian Rankin

(Little, Brown)

An Edinburgh policeman investigates the shooting of three students at a private school by a man who then took his own

life.

*

Poetry

Inner Voices

Selected Poems, 1963-2003

Richard Howard

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poems pondering what is within the soul and in the heavens.

The Orchard

Poems

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

(BOA Editions)

Using allegory and myth in

verse to study the nexus of

consciousness and the dream world.

The Optimist

Poems

Joshua Mehigan

(Ohio University Press)

A look at the darker side of the world today and the desire of the self.

The Clerk’s Tale

Poems

Spencer Reece

(Mariner Books / Houghton

Mifflin)

Poems harking back to Chaucer and the life of a salesman.

Keeping My Name

Poems

Catherine Tufariello

(Texas Tech University Press)

Formal poetry with themes drawn from contemporary life.

*

Science and Technology

The Proteus Effect

Stem Cells and Their Promise

for Medicine

Ann B. Parson

(Joseph Henry Press/National

Academies Press)

A look at the controversial research that holds promise but entails ethical issues.

Opening Skinner’s

Box

Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Lauren Slater

(W.W. Norton)

How psychologists developed theories on free will, conformity and morality.

On the Wing

To the Edge of the Earth With

the Peregrine Falcon

Alan Tennant

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Trailing peregrine falcons as they migrate between the Caribbean and the Arctic.

His Brother’s Keeper

A Story From the Edge

of Medicine

Jonathan Weiner

(Ecco/HarperCollins)

An entrepreneur banks on the promise of gene therapy to save his younger brother’s life.

The Whale and the

Supercomputer

On the Northern Front

of Climate Change

Charles Wohlforth

(North Point Press/Farrar,

Straus & Giroux)

Global warming’s effects on Alaska.

*

Young Adult Fiction

Sammy and Juliana

in Hollywood

Benjamin Alire Saenz

(Cinco Puntos Press)

A high school senior faces a rough world in a 1969 New Mexico barrio.

Doing It

Melvin Burgess

(Henry Holt Books for Young

Readers)

The sexual awakenings of three British teens.

Private Peaceful

Michael Morpurgo

(Scholastic Press)

A British World War I soldier on battlefield watch recalls his childhood.

Under the Wolf,

Under the Dog

Adam Rapp

(Candlewick Press)

A troubled teen tries to deal with his mother’s death and an older brother’s suicide.

How I Live Now

Meg Rosoff

(Wendy Lamb Books/Random

House Children’s Books)

An American teen becomes smitten with her English cousin as London comes under attack.