2005 Lukas Prize Winners

Evan Wright

Entry title: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (G.P. Putnam's Sons).

Awarded: 2005, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)

“With clear and powerful prose, Evan Wright has written a classic book of war reportage. But while evoking the timeless themes of camaraderie and brutality, he has also produced something deeper and more unusual. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War is an unforgettable and at times chilling portrait of the modern American soldier. It reveals both the cultural and military mores that members of the Marines First Recon battalion carried with them to Iraq and the ways that they adjusted to the brutal realities of war. The vividness of the writing, the straightforward description of men killing while under fire, the struggles with incompetent leaders and the individual soldiers’ reactions to pervasive violence and death make Wright’s book a major contribution to the literature of war.”

Honorable Mention

Judges also noted one finalist: Jason DeParle's American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (Viking), "a book in the tradition of Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," DeParle combines a history and analysis of the enactment of welfare reform, perhaps the most important legislation enacted by Congress in a generation, with the story of three women on welfare as they, their children, boyfriends and relatives, live through the consequences of the legislation. The book not only reveals the intricacies of politics of public policy but, more importantly, shows the real world behind the rhetoric of the politicians and the welfare experts. DeParle describes in intimate detail the pressures on the women living on marginal incomes, the corruption and incompetence of the men and women who actually decide who gets a check and who does not, and the savage consequences for the children of welfare.

Jurors

Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Tom Edsall, a reporter at the Washington Post and the author of The New Politics of Inequality and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics; David Maraniss, a reporter on the national desk for the Washington Post, is the author of several books, including They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America (Simon & Schuster), which won the 2004 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and First In His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton. For his coverage of Bill Clinton's life and career, Maraniss won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and Elizabeth Rubin, is a freelance journalist whose articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic.

Richard Steven Street

Entry title: Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford University Press)

Awarded: 2005, The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)

“Beasts of the Field tells the story of California farmworkers from the middle of the 18th century to the start of the 20th century. Along the way it introduces an extraordinary host of individuals and groups: Native Americans, Mexicans, Anglos, Chinese, Japanese and various immigrant Europeans. Taken together, their struggles and sufferings constitute a vivid and historically significant panorama of western-and more broadly American-experience. Deeply researched and movingly written, the book itself is a veritable epic with almost Homerian pathos, bringing to life a lost world whose effects and consequences are felt right to the present day.” The Mark Lynton History Prize jurors were John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University; Carla Hesse, Professor of History at the University of California – Berkeley; and Paul Robinson, Professor of History at Stanford University.

Honorable Mention

A finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize was noted: Melvin Patrick Ely, for Israel on the Appomattox: a Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (Knopf), which "recovers a fascinating biracial world--right in the middle of the slave-based Old South--that history had long since forgotten. Based on meticulous and deeply empathic research in a surprisingly rich trove of local records, the book shows whites, enslaved blacks, and, most especially, freed blacks working, living, trading, competing, cooperating, fighting, and (at least occasionally) loving together, in and around a special little place called by the freedpeople Israel Hill. The story stretches from the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson to the Virginia of Appomattox Courthouse. And it is extraordinary--inspiring and heartbreaking, by turns.

Joan Quigley

Entry title: Home Fires, to be published by Random House

Awarded: 2005, J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($30,000)

“Joan Quigley’s work-in-progress, Home Fires: The Tragedy of an American Mining Town, is a multilayered and passionate study of a community in flames: the old mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which sits atop an underground fire that has been burning for more than four decades. After the fire nearly took the life of a young boy, the community mobilized in an attempt to force the government to take action on “an environmental calamity rivaling Love Canal.” Quigley, a daughter of Centralia, offers a haunting depiction of small town neighbors struggling against a powerful industry and a distant government - and finally, against one another - in their attempt to cope with an environmental catastrophe and the savage backwash of industrial change.”

Honorable Mention

The jurors noted: "On the basis of the Lukas works-in-progress submissions, we believe that some great and even astonishing books are on the way. Yet we have had the gratifying if painful duty of choosing from among these remarkable works-in-progress only one, the one on which, in our view, the Lukas Prize might have the "maximum impact" in carrying to fruition an extraordinary and important work. We also recognize for special citation two finalists, whose works-in-progress hold exceptional ambition and promise and which impress the judges as continuing the kind of work that Tony Lukas did: Amy Bach, for Ordinary Injustice, to be published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., and Steven Greenhouse, for The Big Squeeze, to be published by Knopf. "In her book on the American legal system, Amy Bach is addressing a familiar topic in a wholly original way. With crack reporting and gripping narrative, she offers a glimpse not at attention-getting injustice (like sleeping lawyers or other "bad apples"), but at the justice system's chronic disservice to ordinary Americans. She is attempting to show how and why those who shape American justice, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and even trial clerks, convince themselves they are part of something fair while they regularly and systematically abet injustice. Her book promises to make disturbing and essential reading. Steven Greenhouse's, The Big Squeeze, shows how, and why, most Americans are working longer hours for less pay while their country's economy booms. His take on this paradox combines old fashioned-investigative journalism with first rate economic analysis. Greenhouse has a gift for story telling about the way Americans are living now, in every kind of job and in every kind of financial bind. The Big Squeeze could be one of the most important attempts to explain the paradox of so much class and inequality in the richest democracy in the world.

Jurors

Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Mark Danner, Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights, Democracy, and Journalism at Bard College and the author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy; and Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror; Thomas Geoghegan, a lawyer and the author of the recent book In America's Court; and Samantha Power, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.