The winners of this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes write about irreconcilable differences--the difference between Blackfoot and White Man (James Welch), between Anglo and Latino (Paul Horgan), between German and Jew (Robert Jay Lifton), between Life and Non-life (Richard Dawkins), between Male and Female in a writer's mind (Kenneth S. Lynn), between Art and Nature in a painter's career (William Meredith). At the end of each book (even at the end of Horgan's oeuvre), the differences may remain unreconciled, and yet a unity has become imaginable that was unimaginable at the start. When Hazard, a painter, the central character in a sequence of William Meredith's poems, visits the Natural History Museum, Meredith writes:
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The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, 1987
\o7 We descend by chosen cells that are not lost
though they wander off in streams and rivulets.
Not everyone has issue in this creation.
Cousins-german are everywhere in the shale
and marshes under this dry house. In slime, in sperm,
our living cousins grow. \f7 A cold harmony this, perhaps, but on a coast, along a fault, near a border, after a stock market crash, a mysteriously satisfying one.
PAUL HORGAN
The Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the American West.
Poetry
WILLIAM MEREDITH
Partial Accounts: \o7 New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)\f7
History
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
The Nazi Doctors: \o7 Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books)\f7
Current Interest
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Blind Watchmaker \o7 (W.W. Norton)\f7
Biography
KENNETH S. LYNN
Hemingway \o7 (Simon & Schuster)\f7
Fiction
JAMES WELCH
Fools Crow \o7 (Viking)\f7
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
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March 11, 2004 - Roy Porter, 55; Wrote Acclaimed History of London
March 9, 2002 - Times Book Prizes Finalists Announced
March 2, 2002
