1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

FIRST FICTION

WINNER:

“Don’t Erase Me: Stories” by Carolyn Ferrell (Houghton Mifflin)

FINALISTS:

“A Crime in the Neighborhood: A Novel” by Suzanne Berne (Algonquin)

“Round Rock: A Novel” by Michelle Huneven (Alfred A. Knopf)

“A Child Out of Alcatraz” by Tara Ison (Faber and Faber)

“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (Random House)

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FICTION

WINNER:

“In the Rogue Blood” by James Carlos Blake (Avon Books)

FINALISTS:

“Reading In the Dark” by Seamus Deane (Alfred A. Knopf)

“The Ordinary Seaman” by Francisco Goldman (Atlantic Monthly Press)

“California’s Over” by Louis B. Jones (Pantheon Books)

“The Reader” by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (Pantheon Books)

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BIOGRAPHY

WINNER:

“Whittaker Chambers: A Biography” by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House)

FINALISTS:

“Nazimova: A Biography” by Gavin Lambert (Alfred A. Knopf)

“Burning the Days: Recollection” by James Salter (Random House)

“Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life” by Alan Schom (HarperCollins)

“Bogart” by Ann M. Sperber and Eric Lax (William Morrow)

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HISTORY

WINNER:

“A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924” by Orlando Figes (Viking)

FINALISTS:

“Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume One: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939” by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins)

“Sun Dancing: A Vision of Medieval Ireland” by Geoffrey Moorhouse (Harcourt Brace)

“Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village” by Serge Schmemann (Alfred A. Knopf)

“Fat History: Bodies and Beauty In the Modern West” by Peter N. Stearns (New York University Press)

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CURRENT INTEREST

WINNER:

“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

FINALISTS:

“The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” by Daniel Harris (Hyperion)

“Race, Crime, and the Law” by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon Books)

“Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster” by Jon Krakauer (Villard)

“Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb” by Bernard Lefkowitz (University of California Press)

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

WINNER: “How the Mind Works” by Steven Pinker (W.W. Norton)

FINALISTS:

“The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications” by David Deutsch (Allen Lane)

“Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet” by David H. Grinspoon (Addison-Wesley)

“Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague” by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster)

“The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament” by Robert M. Sapolsky (Scribner)

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POETRY

WINNER:

“Black Zodiac” by Charles Wright (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

FINALISTS:

“Resurrection Update: Collected Poems, 1975-1997” by James Galvin (Copper Canyon Press)

“An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems” by Carol Muske (Penguin Books)

“Natal Command” by Peter M. Sacks (Phoenix Poets Series, Edited by Alan Shapiro) (University of Chicago Press)

“The Four Questions of Melancholy: New and Selected Poems” by Tomaz Salumun, Edited by Christopher Merrill (White Pine Press)