Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney
Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (Simon & Schuster, June 1999)
In one explosive moment, with the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, the gay rights movement went from being the concern of a few pioneers to a genuine social political movement.  Like minority groups before them, America's gay population has had to struggle for its civil rights.  Out for Good, by Dudley Clendinen, an editorial writer for The New York Times, and Adam Nagourney, a political reporter for The New York Times, is a comprehensive national history of the movement and the men and women who both formed or opposed gay rights.  Besides such indelible personalities as Barney Frank, Harvey Milk, Anita Bryant, Rita Mae Brown, Larry Kramer, Paul Monette, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, David Mixner, Urvashi Vaid, Randy Shilts, and James Hormel, the book chronicles the stories of others less well known, whose bravery and commitment helped shape one of the 20th century's last great equal rights struggles.

Frederick Kempe
Father/land: A Personal Search for the New Germany (The Putnam Publishing Group, May 1999)
Father/land is a simultaneous exploration of the course of reunified Germany and a personal history of Frederick Kempe's own German roots.  Kempe, a longtime foreign correspondent and editor, first for Newsweek and then for The Wall Street Journal, is the American-born son of German immigrants, who came to America before World War II and had stressed a thoroughly American identity for their son.  His unorthodox book of observation, insight, and commentary is based on his travels throughout Germany interviewing a wide spectrum of the population -- including students, teachers, pensioners, emigres, soldiers, professionals, Holocaust survivors, cutting-edge diplomats, rural pastors, "normal Germans," and the radical fringe -- and, at the same time, searching for his own family history through documents and talks with his German relatives.

Nicholas Lemann
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October 1999)
Nicholas Lemann, who won the Helen Bernstein Book Award in 1991 for The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, this time takes on the standardized scholastic testing system that is a dominant factor in determining the course of American lives.  Begun 50 years ago as a utopian experiment, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and its Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were designed to replace the entitlements of birth and wealth with what was considered the more democratic entitlement of scholastic aptitude.  In fact, the author contends that at the end of the 20th century "their creation looks very much like what it was intended to replace."  Lemann, the first author granted access to the ETS archives, explains how the American educational establishment's efforts to create a democratic meritocracy backfired; instead, creating what has come to resemble a caste system that offers its beneficiaries and their families great prosperity, ignoring the inequities in basic education, and accentuating society's great racial and economic divides.  Currently a staff writer with The New Yorker, Lemann is the former national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly (1983-99), and earlier, both a writer and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, and The Washington Post.

Michael Lewis
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (W.W. Norton & Company, October 1999)
In the last decade of the 20th century, the Information Age was born and, through the story of one man's odyssey through this uncharted landscape, author Michael Lewis captures both the history of the Internet revolution and the enterprising denizens of this wild west frontier.  With wit and perception, Lewis tracks Jim Clark, the the founder of three separate billion-dollar Internet companies: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon.  Lewis is invited to join Clark as he takes the controls of a helicopter he doesn't know how to fly and as he heads into an Atlantic Ocean storm aboard the world's largest single-masted yacht, which he built and then tries to sail by computer.  With stopovers at such sites as the makeshift cubicles where twenty something programmers work 24 hours a day and the courtroom of the Microsoft antitrust trial, The New New Thing reveals how Silicon Valley  has changed the way business is done and the way success is measured at the start of the 21st century.  Michael Lewis is a contributing editor of The New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg News, and a fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.  His international bestseller, Liar's Poker, was an expose of Wall Street in the 80's.

James Mann (winner)
About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., January 1999)
James Mann went to court with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and won access to a classified study done for the CIA about the secret history of negotiations between the United States and China.  From there, he poured over files, documents and information about the relationship between the two countries at the National Archives and the presidential libraries and uncovered President Nixon's handwritten notes before and during the 1972 China opening.  In scores of interviews, he concentrated on the working-level participants, who had been to the meetings and carried out the day-to-day policies, believing that they would have less to hide and protect than the top officials who were involved.  As a Beijing correspondent in the 1980s, he was frequently struck by the "sense that American policy in Washington is often based on ideas and assumptions that bear little relation to the reality inside China."  The title, About Face, has a double meaning: referring to the "about-face" or change in direction of just about every American president and political party dealing with China in the modern era; and also referring to the Chinese concept of "saving face" in interpersonal relationships.  The book is a history of United States-China relations from Nixon to Clinton, chronicling the people, politics, and forces that shaped the clandestine diplomacy.  James Mann is a diplomatic correspondent and foreign affairs columnist for the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times.  His previous book, Beijing Jeep, is an account of the pitfalls of doing business in China.

Patrick Tyler (winner)
A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History (Public Affairs, September 1999)
Over a span of 30 years, from the administrations of Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, A Great Wall investigates the critical and evolving relationship between the world's most powerful nation and its most populous one.  Fifty years after the Communist revolution and 10 years after Tiananmen Square, this book is the result of four years of research, 15,000 pages of newly declassified White House, CIA, and State Department documents, and 200 interviews with presidents, secretaries of state, Chinese officials, and other key leaders.  It is an account of the behind-the-scenes politics, the intrigues and the betrayals from the 1969 Sino-Soviet border crisis to the 1999 Chinese spy scandal at Los Alamos, and the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.  The book opens with a prologue dealing with the risk of war between the United States and the People's Republic of China over the issue of Taiwan.  Patrick Tyler, a veteran foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is a former Beijing Bureau Chief of the paper.  He is now posted to Moscow.  From 1979-1990, Mr. Tyler was a correspondent for The Washington Post, serving as a Middle East bureau chief based in Cairo from 1986-89, and as a national affairs correspondent covering, at various times, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency.  His 1986 book, Running Critical, is a history of the United States nuclear submarine program under Admiral Hyman G. Rickover.
 

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RCorbin, THoerenz: pro: 05-05-00
THoerenz: pro: 05-05-00