Monday, April 20, 2009

HA HA! YOUR MEDIUM IS (STILL) DYING: 2009 Pulitzer winners just announced. If a local official got involved in a sex scandal this year, it helped your chances of victory, as the NYT (Spitzer) and Detroit Free Press (Kilpatrick) learned. Our No Politics Rule suggests, however, that we leave all the reporting awards to the side, though it's neat to see the St. Pete Times' PolitiFact honored.

In categories of noteworthy interest for this site, Biography/Autobiography was awarded to Jon Meachem for “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House", with runners-up being “Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” by H.W. Brands and “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” by Steve Coll, a book I read with great interest and about which I can't say anything.

History goes to “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” by Annette Gordon-Reed, besting “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” by Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust and “The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s,” by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot. The General Non-Fiction winner is “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” by Douglas A. Blackmon, edging past “Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age” by Arthur Herman and “The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe” by William I. Hitchcock.

The award for Fiction went to “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout "a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating." Other finalists were “The Plague of Doves,” by Louise Erdrich and “All Souls,” by Christine Schutt.

The award for distinguished criticism went to the NYT's Holland Cotter "for his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling," with runners-up being the Inq's indispensible architecture critic Inga Saffron and BoGlo art critic Sebastian Smee.

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