Book Prizes – Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Los Angeles Times | FESTIVAL OF BOOKS: April 30th - May 1, 2011 USC Campus

Winner

• Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (Alfred A. Knopf)

Finalists

• Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (Viking)
• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
• Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (A Shannon Ravenel Book/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
• Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Alfred A. Knopf)

Winner

• Elizabeth D. Samet, Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists

• Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon
• Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press)
• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company)

Winner

• Andrew O’Hagan, Be Near Me (Harcourt)

Finalists

• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
• Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking)
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses: A Novel (Graywolf Press)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher: A Novel (Simon & Schuster)

Winner

• Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books)

Finalists

• Antonia Arslan {Translated by Geoffrey Brock}, Skylark Farm (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Rebecca Curtis, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money (Harper Perennial)
• Pamela Erens, The Understory (Ironweed Press)
• Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (W.W. Norton)

Winner

• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

Finalists

• David A Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin)
• Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (Random House)
• Andrew Nagorski, The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II (Simon and Schuster)
• Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Winner

• Karin Fossum {Translated by Charlotte Barslund}, The Indian Bride (Harcourt)

Finalists

• Benjamin Black, Christine Falls: A Novel (Henry Holt and Company)
• Åke Edwardson, Frozen Tracks: An Inspector Erik Winter Novel (Viking)
• Tana French, In the Woods (Viking)
• Jan Costin Wagner {Translated by John Brownjohn}, Ice Moon (Harcourt)

Winner

• Stanley Plumly, Old Heart: Poems (W.W. Norton)

Finalists

• Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press)
• Elaine Equi, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press)
• Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press)
• Jean Valentine, Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press)

Winner

• Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop (Basic Books)

Finalists

• James L. and Carol Grant Gould, Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence (Basic Books)
• Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking)
• Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press)
• Gino Segrè, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics (Viking)

Winner

• Philip Reeve, A Darkling Plain (The Hungry City Chronicles) (Eos Books/HarperCollins)

Finalists

• Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers)
• Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness (HarperTeen)
• Walter Dean Myers, What They Found: Love on 145th Street (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House)
• Kenneth Oppel, Darkwing (Eos Books/HarperCollins)

Winner

• Maxine Hong Kingston