2009 Lukas Prize Winners

Listen to a webcast with Jane Mayer and George Packer

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner

Jane Mayer's Search for the Truth
By Fran Dauth

2009 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize winner Jane Mayer. Photo/Rebecca Castillo

In an interview, Mayer spoke about the nation’s need to learn more of the details behind the Bush Administration’s secret embrace of torture, but her words also describe what motivated her to write The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

“It’s about the search for truth," she said. "It matters. Something went incredibly wrong here. The consequences have been devastating on many, many levels. We can’t learn from it if we don’t understand it.”

Initially she wrote distinctly separate pieces for The New Yorker: about the bin Laden family; about rendition; about Alberto J. Mora, the Navy’s general counsel who argued against harsh interrogations at Guantanamo; and about John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. It was the latter story that got her to thinking that there was a relationship to these stories.

She began the book, essentially, by compiling a timeline that began on September 11, 2001. Eventually it became a chronology that totaled 300 pages. That timeline was a week-by-week record of everything said, reported or recorded that she could undercover. It became a “Week At A Glance” date book from Hell.

“Someone made a statement, it went into the appropriate week. When I learned of rendition, torture, action, it went into the appropriate week. When you put everything in order, then you see the connections,” Mayer explained shortly before the awards ceremony.

Those connections led her to discount the government’s explanations about a few rotten apples etcetera; that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of rogue guards.

While she had been writing about American torture in one way or another ever since 9/11, she began writing The Dark Side in earnest only one year before its publication.

Her inner taskmaster is what drove Mayer to meticulously document her book, and now to carefully analyze once secret documents that have been made public. Asked her reaction to the spate of information made public since The Dark Side was published.

“There is really rich material that has come out since the book was finished, and also alas, since the paperback was finished," said Mayer in an email. "It makes me very much want to update the paperback. . .Specifically, the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos and the Senate Armed Services Committee report, are full of great new details…But, who initiated this reverse-engineering of foreign torture techniques, and decided that retrofitting them for America was a good idea, still remains murky.

Mayer says there are “many, many documents that still need to be released in order for the American public to truly understand and learn from the history here.”

Finalists:
Edward Alden, The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11
Masha Gessen, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Timothy Brook: Historian and Storyteller
By Fran Dauth

Timothy Brook, principal of St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia. Photo/Rebecca Castillo

Brook recounts the story in the opening pages of his marvelous book, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. “Her town has stayed with me ever since,” he writes. “Mrs. Oudshoorn gave me more than the hospitality of her home. She gave me Delft.”

Thirty-eight years later, Brook, who until recently held the Shaw Chair in Chinese at Oxford University and is principal of St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia, has in turn given readers a remarkable tour of the 17th century that begins in Delft and wends its way through the Far East and the Americas.

Brook went to the University of Toronto in the late 60s as an English Literature major. “It was the cool thing to do,” he explains. But along the way he bumped into people who were followers of Zen Buddhism and he was curious. He learned Chinese and Japanese, studied in China for two years, and eventually earned a doctorate in Chinese history and culture at Harvard.

Why Vermeer? Because Timothy Brook fell off his bicycle near Delft. Because Mrs. Oudshoorn took him in. Because his friend Paul, with whom he stayed in Amsterdam, gave him a book of Vermeer’s paintings. Because, as Brook would say, a writer selects from all the experiences that have washed over him to weave a story.

It took him five years, on and off, to write Vermeer’s Hat, (beginning with reading every book on Vermeer he could get his hands on) which went through several extensive rewrites.

A few reviewers of Vermeer’s Hat read it, not as history but as a book about art, Brook says. They misunderstood, of course, but a critic’s discriminating eye is at work in much of his book. And on the day of the Lukas book awards in Manhattan, Brook took some time out in the afternoon -- to look at some paintings by Picasso.

Finalists:
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Joe Jackson, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe

J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Winner

Judy Pasternak: Nothing Could Be More Helpful
By Fran Dauth

Judy Pasternak, "Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos." Photo/Rebecca Castillo

Her book, planned for publication next year, arose from a 2006 Los Angeles Times series about the dreadful toll uranium mining of long ago is taking today on the Navajo nation. The four-part series won many awards, including ones from Stanford and Columbia universities, and drew national attention, including Congressional hearings, to the on-going severe health problems of the Navajos caused by uranium poisoning. Harvard’s Nieman Narrative Digest wrote, “ This is one of those stories that makes us believe all over again in journalism, in its power to bring truth to light. . .”

But while Pasternak had spent two years on the newspaper project, she wanted to write a narrative history of what happened to the Navajo, of those who profited, of those who tried to warn the government by focusing on one family. Long before prospectors began ripping up Navajo lands for uranium, in the 1930s, a patriarch of one Navajo family
“warned of dire consequences in a holy land defiled. Recoiling from the mysterious stones with instinctive dread, he had said so right from the beginning, urging his people not to intertwine their fates with "leetso" (yellow dirt in the Navajo language). Let the record grant him credit for his foresight. His name was Adika’i,” Pasternak writes in her Lukas award application.

It is the four generations of Adika’i’s family that form the prism through which the story of Yellow Dirt is told. People who built their homes with stones stippled with uranium, whose wells and streams were laced with uranium, who year in, year out filled their lungs with radioactive dust.

In awarding the Work-in Progress Award to Pasternak, the Lukas committee noted: In Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos, Judy Pasternak promises to tell a narrative history of the most dramatic and profound sort. Adika’i, foresaw the harm that would come to the Navajo people. Judy Pasternak’s reporting is impeccable, her writing is vivid, and her subject is a most worthy one. As J. Anthony Lukas proved in Common Ground, this is a recipe for creating a memorable and important work of non-fiction.

Judges: Michelle Goldberg, Janet Silver and Robert Whitaker