Finalists for 2010 LA Times Book Prizes

The finalists for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have just been announced. Some surprises in the bunch and some not-so-surprising (such as more kudos for Rebecca's Skloot's fabulous book -- coming in paperback in two weeks). The winners will be announced in a ceremony at the LA Times on April 29. Several of these books are on my to-be-read list, including The Lotus Eaters, which arrived recently in paperback and looks intriguing. Here is the complete list of finalists; how many have you read?

Biography:

• Miranda Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I (Knopf)
• Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House)
• Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience & Redemption (Random House)
• Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (TWELVE/Hachette Book Group)
• Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House)

Current Interest:

• Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster)
• Sebastian Junger, War (TWELVE/Hachette Book Group)
• Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (Portfolio/Penguin Group)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Fiction:

• Rick Bass, Nashville Chrome (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Richard Bausch, Something is Out There: Stories (Knopf)
• Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf)
• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Frederick Reiken, Day for Night (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction:

• Peter Bognanni, The House of Tomorrow (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)
• Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet (Free Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Sledge, The More I Owe You (Counterpoint)
• Christine Sneed, Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press)
• Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters (St. Martin’s Press)

Graphic Novel:

• Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One (Adhouse Books)
• Dash Shaw, Bodyworld (Pantheon)
• Karl Stevens, The Lodger (KSA Publishing)
• C. Tyler, You’ll Never Know, Book Two: Collateral Damage (Fantagraphics)
• Jim Woodring, Weathercraft (Fantagraphics)

History:

• Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (The Penguin Press)
• John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (W. W. Norton & Company and The New Press)
• Susan Dunn, Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought To Change the Democratic Party (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
• Thomas Powers,The Killing of Crazy Horse (Knopf)
• Steven Solomon,Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (HarperCollins)

Mystery / Thriller:

• Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (William Morrow)
• Tana French, Faithful Place (Viking)
• Laura Lippman, I’d Know You Anywhere (William Morrow)
• Stuart Neville, Collusion (SoHo Press)
• Kelli Stanley, City of Dragons (Minotaur Books/A Thomas Dunne Book)

Poetry:

• Henri Cole, Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Maxine Kumin, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Yehoshua November, God’s Optimism (Main Street Rag)
• Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory {Saina} (Omnidawn)
• Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press)

Science & Technology:

• Oren Harman, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner)
• Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury USA)
• Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books/HarperCollins)
• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown)

Young Adult Literature:

• Marc Aronson & Marina Budhos, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science (Clarion Books)
• Stephanie Hemphill, Wicked Girls: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials (Balzer & Bray/HarperCollins)
• Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon (Disney/Hyperion Books for Children)
• Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings (Greenwillow/HarperCollins)
• Rick Yancey, The Curse of the Wendigo (The Monstrumologist) (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing)