The Lukas Prize Project Announces the 2008 Prize Winners
2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner | |
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For The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
“Jeffrey Toobin tells the story of the Conservative rebellion that has transformed the character of the court, one justice at a time. As Justice Stephen Breyer said from the bench last June, dissenting from a decision that erodes school desegregation, ‘It is not often in law that so few have so quickly changed so much.’ In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas, Toobin has written a work of great narrative journalism in which the particular and the personal illuminate an historic moment. The Nine is a masterful group portrait of the justices who will decide what justice means in America.” |
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2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Winner |
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Peter Silver
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Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America
"We tend to take so much pride in what we call American values—pluralism, tolerance, the spirit of democratic equality—that we rarely stop to ask how, historically, we came to hold them," noted the judges. "Peter Silver's brilliant analysis of frontier violence in the era of the Seven Years' War and the Revolution disturbingly suggests that they depended first of all on the creation of a terrifying enemy. In compulsively readable, quicksilver prose, he shows how ethnically and religiously fragmented settler groups who in times of peace shared little beyond mutual dislike and distrust found common ground in their fear of Indians and came to think of themselves less as English or Scots or Germans than as white people—and Americans—under the pressure of war." |
Finalists:
Ramachandra Guha
for India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
Saul Friedländer
for The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 |
Citation and Bio
Citation and Bio |
2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award Winner |
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Michelle Goldberg
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The Means of Reproduction (to be published by The Penguin Press in 2009)
“Michelle Goldberg looks at literally the entire world through the prism of women's issues and women's rights. From abortion to female circumcision, from sexual trafficking to abstinence-only programs, from Poland to Ethiopia to Nicaragua, she examines the conflict between self-determination and patriarchal tradition. And, in case after case, she contends, a conservative American administration, theologically and pragmatically bound to fundamentalist Christianity, plays either a direct or indirect role. In the tradition of Tony Lukas, Michelle Goldberg explores vast issues through individual lives.” |
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Connie Bruck, staff writer at The New Yorker; Patricia Nelson Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch.
Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner
Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Caroline Elkins, associate professor of history at Harvard University; and Jane Kramer, European correspondent for The New Yorker.
Judges for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
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Kennedy Fraser, author of Ornament and Silence, Samuel G. Freedman, professor at The Journalism School at Columbia University; and Suzannah Lessard, winner of the 2005 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and author of Architect of Desire.
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