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Public
Service - The Boston Globe for the yearlong series documenting
child sexual abuse by priests. |
Investigative
Reporting - Clifford Levy of the New York Times for uncovering
widespread neglect and abuse of the mentally ill living in New York
State regulated adult homes.
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National
Reporting - Alan C. Miller and Kevin Sack of teh Los Angeles
Times for "Vertical Vision", a four part series about
the Harrier aircraft, responsible for 45 non-combat deaths of Marine
pilots.
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International
Reporting - Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan of The Washington
Post for exposing horrible conditions in the Mexican criminal justice
system. |
Feature
Writing - Sonia L. Nazaro of the Los Angeles Times for reporting
on a teenage boys search from the Honduras to North Carolina for his
mother.. |
Beat
Reporting - Diana K. Sugg of The Baltimore Sun for describing
the plight of ordinary people as they passed through the health care
system. |
Explanatory
Writing - The Wall Street Journal for its series on corporate
scandals. |
Breaking
News - The Photography Staff of The Rocky Mountain News for coverage
of the forest fires in Colorado. |
Criticism
- Film Critic Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post for "authoratative
film critism that is both intellectually rewarding and a pleasure
to read".. |
Commentary
- Colbert I. King of The Washington Post for his "against
the grain columns that speak to people in power with ferocity and
widom". |
Editorial
Writing - Cormelia Grumman of The Chicago Tribune for "her
pwerful, freshly challenging editorials against the death penalty". |
"On
the Transmigration of Souls"" by John Adams - A commisioned
work for the New York Philharmonic memorializing the September 11th
tragedy.
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Master
of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
Robert Caro's Master of the Senate examines in meticulous
detail Lyndon Johnson's career in that body, from his arrival in
1950 (after 12 years in the House of Representatives) until his
election as JFK's vice president in 1960. This, the third of a projected
four-volume series, studies not only the pragmatic, ruthless, ambitious
Johnson, who wielded influence with both consummate skill and "raw,
elemental brutality," but also the Senate itself, which Caro describes
(pre-1957) as a "cruel joke" and an "impregnable stronghold" against
social change. The milestone of Johnson's Senate years was the 1957
Civil Rights Act, whose passage he single-handedly engineered. As
important as the bill was--both in and of itself and as a precursor
to wider-reaching civil rights legislation--it was only close to
Johnson's Southern "anti-civil rights" heart as a means to his dream:
the presidency. Caro writes that not only does power corrupt, it
"reveals," and that's exactly what this massive, scrupulously researched
book does. A model of social, psychological, and political insight,
it is not just masterful; it is a masterpiece.
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An
Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation
Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (Author)
In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about
the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson
tells the riveting story of the war in North AfricaThe liberation
of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage
and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first
volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern
reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers
without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa
in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal
point in American history, the moment when the United States began
to act like a great power.Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion
in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British
armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then
take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an
inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a
superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary
but fallible commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower,
Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel.Brilliantly researched,
rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's narrative
provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa.
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Middlesex:
A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (Author)
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably
smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage
boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."
And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek
American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through
time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and
how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the
tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides,
whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains
one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
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A
Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power
spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became
increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing
to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research,
she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history
intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point
of condemning it as it occurred," she writes in this impressive
book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the
horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians,
Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century,
Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much
human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort
by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented
such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest
effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified
information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American
policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will
was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene.
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"Anna
in the Tropics" by Nilo Cruz
A lyrical play set in 1929 Ybor, Florida about a
lector who reads to cigar factory workers.
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Moy
Sand and Gravel: Poems by Paul Muldoon (Author)
A glittering new collection from "the most significant
English-language poet born since the Second World War" (The Times
Literary Supplement)Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his
first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends
from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which
he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal
dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,
as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking
in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the
Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a
hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted
Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed
pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde,
or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for
a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly
in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with
which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans,
along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers,
fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen
canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter
of our age.
Paul Muldoon is the author of eight previous books
of poetry. He teaches at Princeton University and is Professor of
Poetry at the University of Oxford.
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