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Pulitzer books
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published April 22, 2007
These six distinguished works received Pulitzer Prizes on Monday.
FICTION: The Road (Alfred A. Knopf) by Cormac McCarthy. Long one of the best writers almost no one reads, the reclusive McCarthy has launched himself out of semi-obscurity with his 10th novel, a bleakly beautiful tale about a father and small son on a pilgrimage through a savage postapocalyptic landscape. (See Monday's Floridian for a column on McCarthy and The Road.)
DRAMA: Rabbit Hole (Theatre Communications Group) by David Lindsay-Abaire. Known for his whimsical absurdist plays, Lindsay-Abaire took an affecting turn with this wrenchingly realistic study of a family mourning a young son's accidental death.
HISTORY: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation (Alfred A. Knopf) by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. Two veteran journalists brought fresh insight to the history of the civil rights movement by examining how the press, black and white, covered it - and learned from one another.
BIOGRAPHY: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday) by Debby Applegate. Though he had slipped out of the spotlight of history, Applegate found a richly interesting (and protomodern) subject in Beecher, the 19th century equivalent of a rock star: a nationally famous preacher and abolitionist with a taste for luxury and a scandalous private life.
POETRY: Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin) by Natasha Trethewey. A professor of creative writing at Emory University, Trethewey drew on her personal experience as a mixed-race child and on the history of black Union soldiers in the Civil War to write this compelling collection.
GENERAL NONFICTION: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf) by Lawrence Wright. The New Yorker writer constructed a chilling record of the terrorist attacks by focusing on Osama bin Laden, his second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, former FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill and Saudi Arabian intelligence expert Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Colette Bancroft, Times book editor
On the Web
To read more about these books, go to links.tampabay.com.
[Last modified April 19, 2007, 12:48:53]
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by Donna
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04/25/07 03:01 PM
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The book editor is absolutely on target with the review of THE ROAD. I have only read about 20 pages but I think it will be a book I cannot put down since the characters are so beautifully written. Thanks for the review.
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