Lukas Prize Project Awards Ceremony, 2010
By Fran Dauth
In a ceremony honoring winners of the 2010 J. Anthony Lukas Prizes at the Nieman House in Cambridge, MA, on May 4, journalists and authors found themselves at odds with the certainty that infuses much of what is available today online, broadcast on TV and radio, and in print.
Their lack of certainty, it was agreed, while possibly rare, was a good thing.
The tone was set by Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, who recalled a 1986 conversation with the legendary journalist J. Anthony Lukas, for whom the prizes are named. Lukas said people often asked him how the experience of writing his groundbreaking book about school integration in Boston, Common Ground, had changed him.
Lukas, Giles said, told him: “I finally developed an answer which may seem flip, but it was what I felt. I said the book didn’t take me from left to right, or right to left, but from the party of simplicity to the party of complexity.”
Lukas, whose second Pulitzer Prize was for Common Ground, told Giles “he no longer found it so easy to say who was right and who was wrong.” Lukas died in 1997.
Ellen Goodman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist and author who moderated a panel of the winners, continued what seemed the theme of the evening by noting today’s “food-fight journalism” requires everyone to be so “certain and simplistic” in their views.
The danger, she said, was an ensuing simplicity that denies the complexity of the issues facing us today. Complexity, she said, doesn’t “mean that you write into a confused muddle,” but assemble from solidly reported material nonfiction that helps make the world understandable.
It was with that goal in mind, that the Lukas Prize Project Awards were established in 1998. The three prizes, jointly administered by the Nieman Foundation and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, are given to “recognize excellence in nonfiction writing that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work” of Lukas.
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000) went to David Finkel for The Good Soldiers (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The judges’ citation reads: “Of all the excellent books to emerge from the war in Iraq none has done so with the gut-level immediacy and intimacy of The Good Soldiers. There is not an inch of space between David Finkel’s stunning account of the 2-16 Battalion’s experience and the events themselves; his reporting was as close to these soldiers as their own skin. This is not a book about policy or geopolitics or even about military strategy; it is about something far more important, namely the human (and inhuman) aspects of making war … In The Good Soldiers, Finkel does what all great writers do; he makes it impossible to look away.”
The judges named two finalists: Beryl Satter for Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books); and Patrick Radden Keefe for The Snakehead: An Epic tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (Doubleday).
The Mark Lynton History Prize went to James Davidson for The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World (Random House). The judges noted that Davidson has brought “to life, as no author has done, the homoerotic life of the ancient Mediterranean world. The subject of homosexuality in ancient Greek culture, once considered scandalous, has been part of general knowledge for half a century. Now, in a tour de force that combines a careful reading of ancient texts with an extraordinary historical imagination, Davidson steps back from the scholarship, and asks what it meant to the Greeks themselves to live within a homoerotic culture. … His book is one of the most entertaining pieces of historical writing in years, and a delightful invitation to any reader wishing to enter the classical world.”
The judges named one finalist: Jenny Uglow for A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
The J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award ($30,000) was given to Jonathan Schuppe for Ghetto Ball: A Coach, His Team, and the Struggle of an American City.
The Work-In-Progress prize “is given each year to assist in the completion of a significant work of narrative nonfiction on an American topic of political or social concern.” Of Schuppe’s book, to be published by Henry Holt, the judges noted: “Jonathan Schuppe, a former crime reporter for Newark’s Star-Ledger, is a shoe-leather investigative journalist in the best tradition, whose beat has been the underclass of one of our country’s most shamefully derelict cities. His haunting book, Ghetto Ball, will dissolve the boundary between journalism and literature. …
He focuses on a once-promising athlete, rendered paraplegic by a bullet: Rodney Mason, ex-con, former drug dealer, becomes a mentor to impoverished children by creating a ragtag Little League team on a rescued ball field in Newark’s most depressed neighborhood, the South Ward.”
The judges named one finalist: David Philipps, for Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan).
After the authors accepted their awards, they formed a panel to discuss their work and the craft of long-form, narrative nonfiction. The panel, said Nick Lemann, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, would have pleased Lukas who fretted that nonfiction writers didn’t have an intellectual community of their own to share ideas.
As moderator of the panel, Goodman sought to find out how they had made sense of the worlds they had investigated, worlds as diverse as the Iraq War, ancient Greece, and the mean streets of Newark, New Jersey.
In her last column for the Boston Globe, before she retired on January 1, Goodman, the author of eight books herself, wrote this about her career:
“It has been a great gift to make a living trying to make sense out of the world around me. That is as much a disposition as an occupation.”
Under her prodding, the three Lukas Award recipients showed themselves, too, to be possessed of dispositions that led them to serious observation, and, most of all, an open mind about what they were observing.
“Was the story you finally wrote the one you set out to tell and when did it change?” Goodman asked.
Finkel, national enterprise editor of the Washington Post, said his idea had been to do an observed piece on the ground, that he wasn’t interested in a polemic and had not wanted to do an agenda-driven book. He was “embedded” with a battalion based in eastern Baghdad from early 2007 to early 2008, the period of the surge. He hadn’t wanted to write a first-person book, but “simply to do the old deal, where you go, show up and you wait it out.
“And then you stay long enough where what you were thinking in the beginning has nothing to do with what is unfolding in front of you.”
Finkel said he saw members of the battalion go from optimistic and eager to something much different. “I didn’t know what would happen,” he said. What he saw was “800 guys, average age 19, going into a war zone. At first they thought they were invincible, then came the first death and then the second, and then the realization that they weren’t invincible.”
“In a way,” Davidson, head of the Classics and Ancient History department at the University of Warwick in England, said, “I started out with a polemic and (that) was what most people had decided about Greek homosexuality, I decided was wrong.” The consensus among classicists was that Greek homosexuality was “all about power” with little regard to any other consideration, he said. “So I was determined to demolish it.”
But if the established view was wrong, he said, he had no idea what was the right answer. He said began his journey among the ancient Greeks by viewing his task as not slicing through a Gordian knot, but following all the threads tied up together to understand the complex role of homosexuality in their society.
When did you know when you were done with the research? Goodman asked. When his publishers said so, Davidson answered, to laughter. He said he “absolutely didn’t know” what his conclusion would be until about two months before he handed in the finished manuscript. That conclusion, while demolishing the single-view long theory about Greek homosexuality, aptly describes the difficulty of trying to hone in on one simple explanation.
In his conclusion, Davidson writes: “… Unraveling the various strands that Greek Love ties together has taken me to many places I never thought I would visit and produced many surprises along the way. I have learned an awful lot I didn’t know before, despite nearly thirty years of study, and some of what I have learned I did not even know I was ignorant of. The world I was familiar with when I embarked on writing this book has been transformed, by the end, into something odder and richer. Every time a new window of clarity opened up on an area of antique obscurity, something that had once seemed unremarkable began to seem rather more strange. The Greeks were always extraordinary but now they seem more extraordinary. For me at least they have changed and, changed, they make a little more sense.”
Schuppe, winner of the Work-In-Progress prize, of course, doesn’t know yet where his research will take him because it is ongoing. His book began with an assignment at The Star-Ledger in Newark to follow a new Little League team for two to three months of its inaugural season. Schuppe got the idea for the story when he learned that a paraplegic, injured in a drug-related shootout, who he had previously written about, was going to coach the team.
“The kids had no idea how to play baseball and this guy in a wheelchair was going to teach them,” Schuppe said. After the story -- which occupied several pages in the newspaper -- ran, Schuppe knew he had a bigger story. “The story of Newark and the story of a man seeking redemption were the anchors, but the unknowns were the children I was going to follow.”
When his newspaper offered buyouts, he resigned to devote himself to writing about the team, which has been described as the Bad News Bears meet the Bloods and Crips.
Schuppe, who now works part-time for a New York web site, said he spends much of his time gaining the trust of the kids and their parents, mostly single mothers.
Finkel said trust was key to his work as well. When he landed, he said, most of the people he dealt with knew very little about journalism. “The fact that I stayed, that helped. Another thing (was) that when bad things happened, I didn’t become a problem.”
Those bad things, of course, were most often IEDs, which cost about $100 to construct and could, in Finkel’s words, make a $150,000 Humvee seem to have been constructed of lace. IEDs could “burn through a 400-lb. door” and “these things were everywhere,” he told the audience that now seemed to be holding its breath.
Here’s how Finkel described what happened the first time a roadside bomb was exploded in front of him.
“So one day I was in a convoy. It was a pretty day and then there … I don’t know what came first, maybe it was a sound, maybe a change in color from white to brown, maybe it was this odd fluttery feeling moving through me. Whatever it was, everything tilted and shifted, and, and like everybody else, I was just in this cloud of brown, and finally it went away and everybody realized, so one of these things went off and we’re fine. A little dinged up, but we’re fine. The main charge went right in front of my Humvee and behind the Humvee that was probably 10 meters in front.
“So okay, it was quite scary. But I took out my notebook, I took out my recorder, I began documenting the scene while the soldiers went about their business, and at some point it occurred to them, okay this guy, maybe, isn’t an ass. He’s not crying. He’s not freaking out, and this is what a journalist does.
After that, Finkel said, as months went by and he didn’t get in the soldiers way, trust developed.
Eventually, he said, soldiers who wanted to talk had three options; go to the chaplain, go to the combat stress officer or go to the journalist who was with them.
After the book came out, he got hundreds of emails from soldiers who had been in the company he followed and in other units. One of those soldiers told him that he couldn’t talk about what he had seen in Iraq, but he suggests that people who ask read Finkel’s book.
Finkel, asked by Schuppe how writing the book was affected by the relationships he established with the soldiers, said he agonized about one particular line in the book. It came on a day that had begun as a triumph for the battalion when Gen. David Petraeus visited their outpost and told the soldiers that he was aware of the good work they were doing, particularly in guarding a fuel station. Shortly after Petraeus left, a bomb exploded at the fuel station and a soldier was mortally wounded.
At the aid station, every time the wounded man’s chest was compressed, pieces of him literally fell to the floor. “A nurse is trying to tidy up and she kicks something and it rolls against my boot,” Finkel said, “and the soldier next to me looks down and says that’s a toe.”
Finkel said months later when he was writing that scene, he agonized over whether he should include the line, “That’s a toe.” He thought about the dead man’s wife, his parents, who didn’t know much about how he died. Finkel thought about his own children.
He included the line.
After the book came out, he got an email from a family member thanking him for providing a full explanation of their soldier’s death. In the end, Finkel said, the obligation is to the story, not to the relationships you’ve made.
Schuppe, who had asked Finkel about how he dealt with being so close to his subjects, said he was still wrestling with how much he should be present in the book.
Davidson, unlike Schuppe and Finkel, didn’t have live sources to worry about in the sense of their reaction to what he wrote. But his best sources, he noted, weren’t always truthful in their ancient writing. Part of his chore was to determine when they were engaging in hyperbole, joking or putting forward a debate among themselves.
Ancient historians, he noted, often spoke in third person about themselves.
“It’s an old issue,” Davidson said, implying perhaps, that the ancient Greeks also knew a little about food fights.