hello all! i have to do another book report for english (i just finished one on 100 years of solitude) and i was looking for suggestions. i need to do either a historical fiction or an auto/biography. the biography needs to be a pulitzer prize winner. any suggestions greatly appreciated! oh and to all you voracious readers out there (ie all of you) nothing too long--i probably only have a month to read and do a report on it so maybe anywhere between 200-400 pages.
also...my next MUN conference is coming up! i am representing the philippines in the WHO committee and the topics are overpopulation/malnutrition and safety of genetically modified foods. the conference is at High Tech High in San Diego (they're a little biased but, eh who isn't...) any help on that would also be greatly appreciated. oh i did write one policy paper. it's pretty good. you can e-mail me if you want to see it :)
23 comments:
ariel
if the biography has to be a pulitzer prize winner; i would suggest: John Adams by David McCullough. it meets your criteria accept it is longer than four-hundred pages.
i would like to see your policy paper....you can send to llmr42@aol.com
good luck on the model un. i dont think i can be of assistance regarding overpopulation and malnutrition except to say they are too often linked.
there are specific controversies that arise from implimenting the use of genetically modified foods (gmf) in poor, crowded, emerging nations. they need all the food production that they can get per hectare, and would benefit the greatest from gmf. however, the technology for gmf resides mostly in developed nations who are often accused of "experimenting" on the underdeveloped nations. a new kind of economic imperialism. way to complex for me.
you could read malthus. :)
Ari--I enjoy reading Doris Kearns Goodwin (even though she had a tad bit of a problem with plagarism...) and she won the Pulitzer for her book about the Roosevelts. It's called No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.
Another Pulitzer Prize winner that I enjoyed is called Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, although I am not sure it qualifies as a biography. Each chapter is an in depth study of an important event in one of the major Founding Father's lives.
David McCullough's Truman won in 1993 and although I have never read this particular work McCullough is one of my favorite (if not favorite) hitorical writers. I have yet to read something by him that I didn't like. His book about Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, was particularly good.
Here is the Pulitzer website. If you click on the timeline at the top you can see all the winners for whatever year you clicked on.
joseph ellis also had his ethical lapses.
i read mcculloughs 'truman', it was an amazing read. it was one of the best of the presidential bios i have read to date. a better book than adams. it is a long book, which is why i didnt suggest it to ari.
fern,if youre interested in tr i would suggest h.w. brands bio of tr. excellent.
Ellis has plagarized someone?! He is one of my favorite authors. I'll be so disappointed if that's true.
Okay, I did a bit of Googling and it appears Joseph Ellis has had quite the problem with telling the truth but has never plagiarized anyone else's work. Apparently he lied about his military experience to the students in his lectures at Mount Holyoke University. I vaguely remember news of his suspension and mea culpa.
surprised dad didn't recommend "de Kooning: An American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, which won this year's pulitzer prize. although i didn't get to read it all, what i read of it was fantastic (and of course de Kooning is, in my opinion at least, one of the twentieth century's great artists [grandma, of course, strongly disagrees]. i also saw a biography of Jackson Pollack on the list of winners.)
critically speaking, the greatest pulitzer prize winning auto/biography is "The education of Henry Adams," which also topped the modern library association's list of 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. it's one of those books that you could read to check off the list, though the selections i read from it were less than exciting.
my personal recommendation is Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. not only is Ellman a master biographer (i also recommend checking out his biography of Joyce), but Wilde is probably one of the most interesting characters history has ever produced--i think in an earlier post i included him on my list of people in history i'd most like to have over for dinner. reading his biography would allow you to impress/annoy your friends and family at will with his witticisms, of which i submit a few for your consideration:
"work is the curse of the drinking classes"
"i choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
"one should always play fairly when one has the winning cards"
and topically,
"biography lends to death a new terror"
One of my favorite pieces of historical fiction is Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome series which is very well researched. However, each book is very long. The audiobook was approximately 20 hours long. 4 hours is usually about 250 pages so I would guestimate that the book is close to 1,000 pages.
Does biblical fiction count? I really liked Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. It was a quick read (not necessarily beause of the length, although I don't remember it being long, but because the book didn't require serious amounts of thinking). I am pretty sure my mom and Grandma read and enjoyed the book. It is often listed by women as one of their favorite contemporary books (it's wierd how often this book comes up in my day-to-day conversations).
Sorry, for commenting so many times on this same topic, but I love talking about books.
Another good author to check out as far as historical fiction goes is James Michener. Also, I found a book entitled Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. You might see if your library has the book. It is a readers guide to historical fiction complete with reading suggestions organized by subject matter.
i didnt know that dekooning was a pulitzer prize winner until fern posted the link to the pulitzers. it is a great biography, but a long book which did not fit ariels conditions. so far john adams is he shortest of the books mentioned.1
would love to read "the education" henry adams is a great subject. i read wills' book on henry adams recently.
fern never apologize about talking books..... it is a great subject. ariel was looking for bios that won pulitzers...a narrow field.
To think that a year ago i might have been involved in this conversation, but it has been so long since i read anything other then a medical text?
U wanna know anything about biochemistry, Ari?
-m
Larry--Well, she is also looking for historical fiction. Two narrow fields. :-)
Ari--I don't think you're going to find a serious biography (one written for adults...one deserving of the Pulitzer) that is short.
ah youre right fern...i automatically focused on the biography...glossed right over historical fiction.
Hey cool! Germany is definitely higher up the food chain that Vietnam! :-P The Committee on Womens' Rights could be very interesting. Unfortunately throughout much of the Middle East and parts of Africa women don't have anywhere near acceptable levels of human rights. In many of those countries women can't drive, show their hair in public, vote, divorce their husbands, get child custody if their husband divorces them...In some countries women can be stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage. I'm not sure if this is still the case but I think in India women are sometimes burned alive when they do something to upset their husbands.
Oh, Ari, I forgot to add: if you liked Garcia-Marquez you'll probably also really like Salman Rushdie, whose work could plausibly be classified as (magical realistic) historical fiction. His book "Midnight's Children" (the winner of the Booker of the Booker Prize, the near equivalent to the Pulitzer of the Pulitzers in America) spans the history of India from Amritsar to Indira Gandhi through the three generational story of Saleem Sinai, a boy with a psychic nose. Even better, I thought was his book "Satanic Verses," half of which is a historical fictional reimagining of the life of Mohammed that was so subversive it earned Rushdie a price on his head from the Ayatolla Khomeni in Iran.
Fern--the practice of sutee is now illegal in India, and has been since British colonization. In fact, the practice was a popular justification for the colonization itself, the ban of which was one of the "white man's burdens" in "civilizing" the subcontinent.
and, the wife was burned on the husband's funeral pyre if her husband died before she did (I believe the reason being that the fact she lived longer than he did was taken as evidence of a past (life) sin, which could only be expiated on the pyre).
Ryan--A quick Google search suggests that the practice still occurs...and that the punishment for doing so is not very serious.
From the Wikipedia article on sati (suttee):
"In modern India, following outcries after each instance, there have been various fresh measures passed against the practice, which now effectively make it illegal to be a bystander at an event of sati. The law now makes no distinction between passive observers to the act, and active promoters of the event; all are supposed to be held equally culpable. Other measures include efforts to stop the 'glorification' of the dead women. Glorification includes the erection of shrines to the dead, the encouragement of pilgrimages to the site of the pyre, and the derivation of any income from such sites and pilgrims.
Enforcement of these measures is not always consistent however. The enforcement of some measures, such as the possible stopping of worship at ancient shrines, is a matter of modern controversy."
One of the stories I just read involved a guy who burned his wife to death because he was mad at her and then wrote poetry about it while in jail. He only got 14 years and just recently won a poetry award from the government. Also, CNN reported about the practice in 1996.
Fern--I don't see you on AIM. But I suppose the blog substitutes for speedy post dueling. :-)
Yeah...I shouldn't be posting. I should be finishing my Federal Jurisdiction outline. :-P
ariel
here is an idea in the historical fiction category
"The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon" by
Richard Zimler.
310 pages
set in 16th century portugal...
from the jacket
'transports the reader into the mystical universe of kabbalah during the lisbon massacre of 4/1506. just a few years earlier, jews living in portugal were dragged to the baptism font and forced to convert to christianity.
one such secret jew was berekiah zarco...he searches for the killer of his beloved uncle abraham, a renowned kabbalist discovered murdered in a secret synagogue.....
i read this about seven years ago, it was a very fast read. murder, kabbalah, mystery, inquisition, expulsion,short...whats not to like. good glossery for those difficult terms.....
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