2000 Lukas Prize Winners

Witold Rybczynski

Entry title: A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century, Scribner

Awarded: 2000, The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

The jurors said: "In the spirit of Olmsted the book is well-balanced, unassuming in its manner, and at the same time an original and imaginative work."

Jurors

The prize's jurors were Henry Mayer (All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison & the Abolition of Slavery, which won last year's Lukas Book Prize), Frances FitzGerald (Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War and A. Scott Berg (Lindbergh)

John W. Dower

Entry title: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press

Awarded: 2000, The Mark Lynton History Prize

The prize's jurors called the book "an extraordinary work of history, fresh, authoritative, entertaining and important." The judges cited the book as, "sensitive and scrupulously fair to both sides, understanding of individual cultural differences but wise about humankind, based on exhaustive research and presented with gracefully crafted language, "Embracing Defeat" exemplifies the qualities so conspicuously present in the work of Tony Lukas."

Jurors

The prize's jurors were Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence), Theodore Rabb (Jacobean Gentlemen: Sir Edwin Sandy 1561-1629) and Geoffrey Ward (The West)

James Tobin

Entry title: Work of the Wind: A Remarkable Family, an Overlooked Genius, and the Race for Flight, to be published by the Free Press

Awarded: 2000, The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award

The prize's jurors said "the book offers ample 'history news,' about the Wright Brothers -- things we thought we knew about them but in fact did not. The writing is as elegant as the research is surprising."

Honorable Mention

Two finalists were also noted: Larry Tye's forthcoming Diaspora, to be published by Dutton Plume Publishing, which will tell the story of Jews who are forever rooted in Israel but no longer need to live there, who are thriving in secular societies around the world while clinging to a core of shared beliefs and practices that define them as Jews, and Elizabeth Gitter's Buried Alive: Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf Blind Girl, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which tells the little-known story of Laura Bridgman, internationally-celebrated in the 1840s as the first deaf blind person ever to be educated.

Jurors

The prize's jurors were Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography), Susan Sheehan (Is There No Place on Earth for Me?) and David Laventhol (publisher and editorial director of Columbia Journalism Review)