Book Awards: Arthur Ross Book Award

         

I have a few deeply held beliefs about books. Cracking book spines on purpose should be punishable by law. Public libraries are civic churches. And, maybe most importantly, life is too short to read crappy books.

I'm not saying that every novel a person reads should be Tolstoy or David Foster Wallace. Every person has an inalienable right to define what they consider a crappy book. If Twilight is what moves someone to pick up a book, and they love what they find there, godspeed. Shakespeare, Stephen King, David McCullough, Janet Evanovich--whatever turns you on. All I'm saying is that, whether one turns to a book for pure escapist entertainment, information on a subject of interest, or fiction that can help us understand life from another person's point of view, we should read books that stimulate us, that successfully carry out their function. Life is fleeting, and we can only pack so much reading into one lifetime. Lots of people read more than me, but I find that I have to really focus in order to read 50 books a year. Over the course of a lifetime, there's a fairly definable upper limit to how many books I'll be able to read. And it is shorter than the list of books that I'd like to read. Much shorter.

Hence, my rule: no crappy books.

I love books. I have a house full of them, which sometimes makes it difficult to decide what to read next. Sometimes I'm curious about a particular historical period and I need to choose between a group of books all on similar topics. Sometimes I'm looking for a shortcut to find a readable, important work of history or fiction or biography.

One of the (many) ways that I choose what to read is to keep an eye on book awards. Particularly for works of non-fiction, I find it interesting to see which works juries of scholars or practitioners believe contribute the most to their fields. It's not always a perfect means of finding books that I love, but usually books applauded by juries are at least worth a second look.

Dozens of book prizes are awarded every year, but it can take quite a bit of research to nose them out and keep track of them. I'll do that for you. You're welcome. :) Periodically in this blog, I will devote a posting to a book award, and they'll all bear the tag "book award" so that you can easily search for them (just click those words at the bottom of this column).

Today, I wanted to draw attention to the Arthur Ross Book Award, which is sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. This award recognizes books that "make an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations." I've read a handful of the books listed below, and they have been exceptional--some of the finest non-fiction I've ever come across (Postwar by Tony Judt, Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid, The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, and Ghost Wars by Steve Coll are all standouts.)

Below, you will find the 2012 winners, announced on January 23, 2013, plus previous Gold, Silver, and Honorable Mention awards stretching back to 2002. Dive in, and especially if you've already read any of these, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section. Enjoy!



2012 Winners
Gold Medal: John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life
Silver Medal: Jason Stearns for Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of Congo and the Great War of Africa
Honorable Mention: Daniel Yergin for The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

2012 Short List:
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Kruschev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

Previous Arthur Ross Awards

2011
Gold Medal: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
Silver Medal: Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979
Honorable Mention: Charles A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace

2010
Gold Medal: Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Silver Medal: Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
Honorable Mention: Gerard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

2009
Gold Medal: Philip P. Pan, Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
Silver Medal: Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
Honorable Mention: Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

2008
Gold Medal: Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Silver Medal: Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
Honorable Mention: Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

2007
Gold Medal: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Silver Medal: Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War
Honorable Mention: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

2006
Gold Medal: Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Silver Medal: Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah
Honorable Mention: George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

2005
Gold Medal: Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Silver Medal: Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
Honorable Mention: James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

2004
Gold Medal: Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America
Silver Medal: Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century
Honorable Mention: Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy

2003
Gold Medal: Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
Silver Medal: Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
Honorable Mention: Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

2002
Gold Medal: Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937-1946
Silver Medal: Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam
Honorable Mention: Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

Second Saturday Book Sale Haul

On the second Saturday of each month, my local branch library's volunteers hold a book sale to raise money for the children's book collection. Almost all the books are $1, which is devastatingly affordable. As the months pass, it's becoming clear that the hidden cost of the $1 books is the constant demand for new shelving. :)

So. Have you read any of these? I haven't. Where should I begin? Recommendations?

2013 Countdown #3: Man's Search for Meaning, ****

I had heard of Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning previously, but until earlier this year, I had misunderstood what it's about. I had assumed that it was a work of philosophy, which I suppose is true in a way. But it's more accurate to describe the book partly as the author's memoir of surviving the Holocaust and partly as a description of the psychotherapeutic technique that the author, a psychiatrist, developed to help people who have experienced terrible traumas.

The book is an insightful and thought-provoking examination of how we find meaning in life and how we bear suffering. In the first half of the book, Frankl describes--with almost heartbreaking understatement--his life in a German concentration camp during World War II. There are no heroes in his memoir: he is chillingly matter-of-fact about everyone in the camp, both guards and guarded. He frequently downplays his own suffering by offering disclaimers that others endured conditions much worse than his, that their hardships eclipsed his somehow. Several times, he mentions almost apologetically that others have already described the living conditions, the medical trials, the senseless brutality, and the casual killings that filled the days there.

When the war finally ended, Frankl dedicated much of his time to providing psychotherapy to other survivors. Many traditional therapeutic methods required patients to dwell on past traumatic experiences, which kept the wounds open. Frankl chose a different approach, which he called logotherapy. Logotherapy asked the patients to focus on the future instead of the past, helping them to define some specific life objective that could help bring meaning to the individual's future life. Frankl quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

Frankl's theory was that suffering becomes more bearable if one can make some sense of it. This passage of the book moved me: "Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, 'What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?' 'Oh,' he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!' Whereupon I replied, 'You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering--to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.' He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

For a layperson like me, the technical aspects of the psychotherapy presented in the second half of the book overwhelmed the book's basic message a bit, which is why I rated the book 4-stars instead of 5. But it is still a memorable, tremendously worthwhile read.

2013 Countdown: Book #2, The Liberator, ****

For my second book of the year, I recently finished Alex Kershaw's The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau. Although I'm very interested in 20th century European history, I hadn't specifically planned to read the book--it just happened to be sitting on the shelf of new arrivals at my local library, and the first few pages pulled me in immediately. I love it when that happens--it's an unexpected gift.

With all the books, movies, and television shows about World War II, it's becoming increasingly difficult for new material about that period to present something fresh and original. That's one of the reasons why Kershaw's book appealed to me: I've read much less about the Allied campaign in Italy than about the D-Day landings or the war in the Pacific, for example. Also, Kershaw explains events by following the experience of a single soldier, Felix Sparks, an American infantryman whose unit landed on Sicily in 1943 and who fought through Italy, France and Germany, ultimately being among the handful of men who liberated the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Even though Kershaw tells the story through the lens of one person, he balances the micro-level narrative with all the macro-level context necessary to understand why the battles are significant and how the overall war effort is proceeding at each stage.

The story is gripping, and Kershaw's writing is smooth and well-paced. He introduces Felix Sparks as such a likable and heroic figure that I wasn't just reading about Sparks, I was worrying about him as he fought through Europe. And I was imagining how awful it must have been for his wife and parents, knowing that he was in constant danger.

More than once, The Liberator reminded me of John Steinbeck's outstanding book Once There Was a War, which was a collection of the articles he wrote as a journalist covering the WWII. Steinbeck's journalism has a lot in common with Kershaw's narrative nonfiction: both are at their best telling stories of individuals who didn't choose to go to war but who act with integrity and courage, doing their best as small parts of a mammoth war effort. Done well, as it is in these two cases, that is a worthy read.

Take THAT, Baltimore! :)

Baltimore may have won the Superbowl on Sunday, but the results of the literary nerd Superbowl came in today, and finally D.C. won something. :) For the second year in a row, Washington, D.C. was named the U.S.'s "most literate city."

Every year since 2005, Central Connecticut State President John Miller has ranked U.S. cities with population above 250,000 according to their data on six indicators of literacy: the number of bookstores, educational attainment, internet resources, library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publishing resources. D.C. took the top spot, as it did last year. D.C. ranked first in the country for internet resources and for periodical publications, but as a D.C. resident who adores bookstores, I was disappointed to see that we ranked 15th in that category. The big winners in bookstores per capita were the Twin Cities: St. Paul and Minneapolis came in first and third, respectively.

As someone who has called D.C. home for a long time, I'd venture a guess that there's more interest here in the latest Congressional Budget Office report than the latest Murakami novel. But even so, people here are engaged readers, and there are resources and amenities for all tastes. Our flagship independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, holds 500 literary events a year (in fact, I attended one last night, when Susan Cain spoke about her excellent book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking). We've got a wide range of high-quality hometown newspapers. And libraries like this are open to the public:

Library of Congress Main Reading Room

Not bad, right? :)

You can read the full study here, and these are the top ten most literate cities in 2012 :

1.   Washington, D.C. (same as in 2011)
2.   Seattle (same as in 2011)
3.   Minneapolis (same as in 2011)
4.   Pittsburgh (up from No. 6)
5.   Denver (up from No. 10)
6.   St. Paul (up from No. 12)
7.   Boston (down from No. 5)
8.   Atlanta (down from No. 4)
9.   St. Louis (down from No. 8)
10. Portland, OR (up from No. 11)