2002 Lukas Prize Winners

Diane McWhorter

Entry title: Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, Simon & Schuster

Awarded: 2002, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

The prize jurors noted: "Carry Me Home turns the story of the author's hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, into an American epic of race and class conflict. McWhorter's tireless research reveals how the historic and much-studied civil rights movement of the 1960s actually originated in events and characters from the labor and political struggles of preceding decades. McWhorter shifts the lens from the movement's most famous standard-bearers to unfairly neglected pioneers like Fred Shuttlesworth. She also puts human faces on the white resistance, especially those of the local Ku Klux Klan, while tracing the shifting and complex responses of Birmingham's most prominent white citizens. This densely populated, stylishly written book weaves an enormous amount of detail into a powerful tale of moral and social significance."

Jurors

Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize were Susan Faludi (Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man), William Finnegan (Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country) and George Packer (Blood of the Liberals).

Mark Roseman

Entry title: A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany, Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Company

Awarded: 2002, The Mark Lynton History Prize

Prize jurors noted that the book "provides a new perspective on the German Jews' experience of persecution by the Nazi regime. Intimately focused on the experience of one young woman in Berlin, the book illuminates a much larger canvas of Jewish and of German history. It shows in unexpected ways how the personal can shed light on the political. In fascinating and disturbing detail, the author explores the relations (and the gaps) between history and memory, between official policies and human maneuverings, between group designations and individual self-understandings. Grounded in Mark Roseman's deep and broad knowledge of the Holocaust and in elegant detective work on the life of one of its survivors, the book is artful, subtly and sensitively composed. It leaves the reader with much to ponder on human capacities for coping with deadly oppression and its aftermath."

Honorable Mention

Two finalists were also noted: David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, Knopf; and James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, University of Chicago Press.

Jurors

Jurors for the Mark Lynton History Prize were Nancy Cott (The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835), Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud) and David Rothman (Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making).

Jacques Leslie

Entry title: On Dams, to be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux

Awarded: 2002, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award

Judges noted: "Jacques Leslie's work in progress about dams around the world persuasively argues that water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th: an increasingly scarce but crucial natural resource that is `the prize' on a global battlefield. It's a struggle that involves every possible issue-economic globalization, international politics, the clash of cultures, global warming, agricultural policy and conservation. Through the personal and professional experiences of an Indian activist, an American anthropologist and a Dutch engineer, Leslie explores and elucidates this complex material and makes it intelligible in elegant, beautiful prose."

Honorable Mention

Two finalists were also noted: Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Eugenics and Forced Sterilization in the United States, to be published by Knopf; and Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farm Workers, Formative Years 1769-1913, to be published by Stanford University Press.

Jurors

Jurors for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award were Ted Conover (Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing), Jonathan Harr (A Civil Action) and Sara Mosle (former editor at The New York Times Magazine and at The New York Times Book Review).