2009 Lukas Prize Project Awards
Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project honors the best in American nonfiction writing.
A Celebration of Reporting and Writing in Book-Length Nonfiction
By Fran DauthIt was a celebration of books, albeit books that in many ways resemble the best of journalism, so it shouldn’t have been surprising that an uninvited guest dressed in mourning clothes kept moving about in the background of the May 12, 2009 festivities honoring winners of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards.
Nick Lemann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was the first to mention the specter of an ailing newspaper and magazine industry.
"I would have to say there is a lot of concern now about the supposedly crumbling business model for journalism, particularly newspapers," he said in his opening remarks.
Daniel Okrent, an author, magazine and book editor, and the first public editor at The New York Times who moderated a panel discussion among the winners, vowed to stay away from “the impending doom and death of newspapers” because, as he said, “this is a night for celebration. … There is nothing to mourn at all.”
And indeed as the prizes were announced, the evening did become a celebration of wonderful reporting and writing in book-length nonfiction, suggesting that while the king might be gasping for breath, there are plenty of reasons for readers to shout, long live the king.
It is arguable, Lemann said, that the awards, given in the memory of J. Anthony Lukas, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author who died in 1997, have contributed to the current quantity and quality of book-length nonfiction.
Such work has “become a really important branch of journalism at this school and generally out in the world, and the fact that we’re keeping it all going in our own way means a lot to me and I think to everybody here,” Lemann said.
Before he introduced the winners, Okrent talked about the ingredient he said was essential in the kinds of books celebrated in the awards, and that was the “grinding, repetitive, frustrating, at times privacy-invading and often thrilling essential thing called reporting. It starts with that. . .“Shapely tale telling, that comes after the reporting, he said. "You can write with the grace of an angel and have the ideas of a philosopher, but if you don’t do the reporting, you’re just a columnist.
The Lukas awards “acknowledge the work of committed people who put in the work and years to learn what we don’t already know and they have found a way to put what we don’t know into words that demand to be read, nonfiction for people who truly read,” he said.
Introducing the winners
The 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize was awarded, in the words of the committee, “to a book-length work of narrative nonfiction on an American topic that exemplifies the literary grace, the commitment to serious research, and the social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake.” It went to Jane Mayer for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, published by Doubleday.
The Mark Lynton History Prize, “awarded to a work of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression,” went to Timothy Brook for Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, published by Bloomsbury.
The J. Anthony Lukas Prize For A Work In Progress, “given to aid the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern,” was awarded to Judy Pasternak for Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos, to be published by Free Press.
Read interviews with the winnersHow the author views his audience
After the presentation of the awards, the panel discussion among the winners underscored the importance of the value of reporting and compelling writing. Okrent’s first question was about the authors’ view of their audience.
“When we’re writing for newspapers and magazines, we have a very clear sense of the audience. We don’t with a book,” Okrent said. “Do you think of the audience in a different way, do you think of the audience at all?”
Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former national and foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said that while it was true that when she wrote at the New Yorker she considered her audience very erudite, she had a much different audience in mind when she worked on a book.
“The person I keep in the back of my mind is my Aunt Jane who just turned 90 and she enjoys a great story,” she said.In writing The Dark Side, Mayer said, she was trying to write for the “whole country and make it something everybody is going to care about.”
What buying the book says about the audience
Okrent asked whether someone who was going to pay $25 to $30 for a book didn’t ensure a caring audience. Mayer said she agreed, up to a point. “I think it is a wider audience that I am aiming for. I really wanted to make it a page turner. . .that’s why the book opens with (Vice President Richard) Cheney facing his own mortal peril in the Situation Room … I really wanted it to be a yarn as well as everything else.”
As a professor in a department of history, Brook, who teaches at the University of British Columbia, said, “I’m in a different space. How can I put this as nicely as possible? I don’t think about my audience.”
He said, however, that his prize winning Vermeer’s Hat came “out of teaching first-year students how to think about world history. So in a sense ideas in the book were shaped by a not necessarily literate audience but by willing 18-year-olds who want to hear me try to make sense of the world.”
Pasternak, a veteran newspaper reporter turned author, said that in many ways she was writing her book about the Navajo nation’s uranium health crisis for herself because she had worked on the topic for a newspaper series before she started the book.
“I was so fascinated by this country within a country that I stumbled into, that most people don’t know a lot about and the history that I was learning there and the customs and the culture.“ So even though she had a lot of space in the newspaper series there was so much more she wanted to relate about the crisis facing the Navajos. “So some of this was for me.”
Later an audience member asked her and Mayer whether their comments were an indictment of the newspaper and magazine industries? (Note how the uninvited guest seems to have sunk into an empty chair and not left as many had hoped he would.)
No, Pasternak said, “The Los Angeles Times gave me two years” to do the series, she said. “I had great support.” The newspaper is still trying to do very ambitious series, she said, probably just not as many. “I think, as Jane (Mayer) said the book tells the story in a different way and may reach a different audience. The newspaper series was pretty deep. … I can’t say the Los Angeles Times skimped at all.”
Brook said his task had been to insert himself into the text “because as a historian you’re kind of expected to disappear and you assert your authority," he said, through the assembly of the information and the facts you’re giving the reader. "So I had to put myself back into the story and it’s a little hard to put yourself into the seventeenth century.”
How important is imagination?
To get the panelists to discuss the importance of imagination, Okrent quoted Pulitzer Prize winning historian Allan Nevins: “If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily it is a pageant and like all works of art it is fails at the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paint.”
“That’s unfair,” Mayer exclaimed. Nevins was her grandfather.While appreciative of the quote, Mayer said she doesn’t have the luxury of making things up, one definition of imagination. Although she was not present to witness the activities she wrote about, she could see “from the people I was interviewing that it was horrifying (torture on detainees) and it was actually the look in the eyes of some of the people I was interviewing that made me realize what a serious subject this was. There was one person who I had lunch with, he couldn’t tell me everything he’d seen with the U.S. torture program. He just said it is the most horrific, sophisticated program of psychic demolition that the world has ever seen.”
Brook, of course, didn’t have the advantage of interviewing anyone who had first-hand knowledge of the seventeenth century. What he had was “an infinite number of inert facts and I had to find some way to bring them together.” He said he felt creative when he did this kind of nonfiction writing although he didn’t make anything up.
Pasternak said her version of “imagination” was the process of getting people who, for good reason, are guarded around strangers to allow her “to get as deep as possible” to be able to write accurately at what happened to the Navajo and why.
How do you know it's done?
Okrent asked whether as book authors, as opposed to newspaper or magazine writers with fixed deadlines, they knew when they were done.
Mayer said she had pleaded for more time on the book and even now regretted that she hadn’t been able to add material to the paperback version. She said her experience as a newspaper and magazine writer was that she knew she had to face “the terror of writing” when the reporting became repetitive. Brook said he had his own sense of when the research “was full.” Pasternak, of course, isn’t done. Her book is scheduled for publication next year. Her manuscript is due in September.
There were more comparisons to newspaper work, some of it referring to what fishmongers use to wrap their catch, but no one seemed to mind: The uninvited guest had finally left the building.
How Nick Lemann said no to Tony Lukas
The last time Nick Lemann saw Tony Lukas was when the two had lunch shortly after Lukas had been named head of the Authors Guild.
“The purpose was to get me to chair a committee to look into the changing economics of the book business,” Lemann told an audience of authors, editors, agents and others involved in the book business gathered for the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Prizes Project ceremony.Lemann didn’t want the job. But, as he recounted, he did head the committee.
“I think we started with the supposition that as in all matters the authors were getting screwed and the publishers were getting rich. . .We discovered to our surprise that the publishers weren’t getting rich either. Somebody else must be,” he said.
And what about Lemann’s refusal to take the job of leading the committee? He explained: “At the end of the lunch I thought I had effectively said ‘No” and as we parted Tony said, ‘Great, so you will do it.’ ”
Fran Dauth is the former editorial page editor of the Star-Ledger in Newark. She previously worked as reporter and editor for The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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