BOOK PRIZES 1989 : <i> 10th</i> Anniversary Year

This year the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program celebrates its tenth anniversary. The program, unchanged in format since 1981 when the history/biography prize split into separate prizes for history and for biography, changes this year by the addition of a prize for science and technology. Like all the Times prizes, this one--whose first recipient is Frans de Waal for “Peacemaking Among Primates”--is intended for a book of uncompromising quality that is accessible, nonetheless, to the general reader.

Among the other 1989 winners, Neal Gabler’s revealing “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” may be the most Angeleno winner in the 10 years of the program; Tobias Wolff’s moving “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir” is the first autobiography ever to win. Where there is life, notoriously, there is change, but where there is identity there must also be continuity. This year’s winners offer both vitality and identity in abundant measure.

FICTION

Fay Weldon for “The Heart of the Country” (Viking)

POETRY

Donald Hall for “The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts” (Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin)

HISTORY

Neal Gabler for “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Holly wood”(Crown Publishing)

BIOGRAPHY

Tobias Wolff for “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir” (Atlantic Monthly Press)

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Frans de Waal for “Peacemaking Among Primates” (Harvard University Press)

CURRENT INTEREST

Taylor Branch for “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963” (Simon & Schuster)

THE ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD

Karl Shapiro (See Page 2.)