Вручение 2013 г.
Страна: США
Дата проведения: 2013 г.
Премия в области американской исторической художественной литературы
Лауреат
Гари Шанбахер
0.0
In spring of 1858 Thompson Grey, a young farmer, travels to his father’s estate seeking funds to expand his holdings. Far overstaying his visit, he returns home to find that his absence has contributed to a devastating family tragedy. Haunted by remorse, Thompson abandons his farm and begins a westward exile in the attempt to outpace his grief.Unwittingly, he finds himself at journey’s end in the one place where his strongest temptations are able to over take him and once again put him to the test. Set against the backdrop of the frontier during the years just preceding the Civil War, Crossing Purgatory tells a story of unprincipled ambition, guilt, and the price one man is willing to pay for atonement.
Премия в области американской исторической художественной литературы (почётное упоминение)
Christine Wade
0.0
Set in the Catskills on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Seven Locks is a spare, haunting, and beautifully written debut for readers who loved The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
In the years before the American Revolution, a woman’s husband mysteriously disappears without a trace, abandoning her and her children on their farm at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. At first many believe that the farm wife, who has the reputation of being a scold, has driven her husband away. But as the strange circumstances of his disappearance circulate, a darker story begins to unfold, sending the lost man's wife on a desperate journey to find the means and self-reliance to ensure her family’s survival.
Inspired by a famous American folktale, Seven Locks is an ambitious and poignant exploration of family love, secrets, and misunderstandings, and of the inner and outer lives of the American frontier at the end of the eigtheenth century.
In this lyrical and complex book, which opens with a mystery and ends with a literary twist, Wade creates a rich, imaginative and tactile evocation of life and times in the historical Hudson River Valley, where the lines between myth and reality fade in the wilderness beyond the small towns, while an American nation struggles to emerge.
Pamela Schoenewaldt
0.0
From the author of When We Were Strangers comes a uniquely American story-a tale of deep, shifting ties between a determined daughter and her gifted, wounded mother in the early 1900s, framed by bitter union strikes, the thrill of vaudeville and a young woman's struggle to find her place
Lucia D'Angelo's voice is nothing like her mother's. She's no nightingale with the gorgeous tones, tender and passionate, peaking and plummeting as dramatically as her moods. Yet in the rough world she's chosen, Lucia's words may truly change lives.
In 1904, fourteen-year-old Lucia and her young mother Teresa are servants in a count's lush villa on the Bay of Naples. Between scrubbing floors and polishing silver, Teresa soothes the unhappy countess with song until one morning's calamity hurls mother and daughter to America, exchanging their gilded cage for icy winds off Lake Erie and Cleveland's taut immigrant neighborhoods. Lucia blossoms and Teresa wins fleeting fame on the tawdry stage of vaudeville until old demons threaten their new life. In factories and workhouses, Lucia finds her own stage, giving voice to those who have given her a home. As roles reverse, mother and daughter reshape their fierce and primal bond.
Премия в области американской юридической истории или биографии
Лауреат
Whitney Strub
0.0
For some, he was America's leading smut king, hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law--and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times--the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates--by using Roth's own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices.
The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan's majority opinion--which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept obscene expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan's written words necessarily acknowledged.
In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.
Премия в области американской юридической истории или биографии (почётное упоминание)
Alexander Wohl
0.0
When Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark resigned his seat on the bench at the youthful age of 67 after 18 years, his decision was unique in the annals of Court history: he was leaving so that his son Ramsey, just nominated as Attorney General, could assume the job Clark himself had once held without conflict of interest.
As Alexander Wohl shows, Tom and Ramsey Clark had a profound impact on American law and society. For nearly three quarters of a century, they influenced presidents, policies, and legal rulings, during careers that tracked closely with some of the most significant and controversial episodes in modern American history. Highlighting their consistent effort to balance individual liberties with government power, Wohl examines how their work reflected the tensions that continue to resonate in today's legal and policy battles.
The two men, however, evolved quite differently. As a young government lawyer, Tom Clark was a key figure in enforcing the relocation of Japanese Americans, and as Attorney General he was vilified by civil liberties advocates for the Cold War policies he implemented, even as he promoted a progressive strategy on civil rights. Ramsey began his career to the ideological left of his father, was intimately involved in enforcement of civil rights laws during the turbulent 1960s, as Attorney General fought to expand protections of individual rights, and as a private attorney represented clients on the farthest reaches of the individual rights-government power spectrum.
A unique approach for understanding our nation's history during the second half of the twentieth-century, Wohl's study addresses such salient issues as civil rights, free speech, government surveillance and rights of privacy, presidential power, and the role of judges in interpreting the Constitution. The Clarks' lives and careers also offer a veritable who's who of 20th-century American law and policy: from Tom's close relationships with Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Earl Warren, to Ramsey's connections with Robert Kennedy, LBJ, and Martin Luther King Jr. Both men befriended and battled J. Edgar Hoover and both were targets of political attack--twenty years apart--by Richard Nixon.
At its fundamental core, however, Wohl's book presents a moving and intimate portrait of a unique father-son relationship that endured through triumph and tribulation and that should appeal to anyone interested in how the personal and the political intertwine in a highly public setting.
