Browse All Work by DLPP Recipients and Runners-Up

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1968: The Year that Rocked the World

Mark Kurlansky
2004

People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth of the women's movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe. Everything was disrupted. In the Middle East, Yasir Arafat's guerrilla organization rose to prominence . . . both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters . . . the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use . . . the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there . . . and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase "women's liberation." Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year. It was the year that an amazed world watched the first live telecast from outer space, and that TV news expanded to half an hour. For the first time, Americans watched that day's battle--the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive--on the evening news. Television also shocked the world with seventeen minutes of police clubbing demonstrators at the Chicago convention, live film of unarmed students facing Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a war of starvation in Biafra. The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. The fact that one now needed television to make things happen was a cultural revelation with enormous consequences.
Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History

Mark Kurlansky
2002

Contains over two hundred essays on a variety of gourmet foods from around the world and throughout history including pieces by Cab Calloway, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Irving Berlin, and Plato.
Salt: A World History

Mark Kurlansky
2002

The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions.
The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories

Mark Kurlansky
2000

A comedy of cultural misunderstandings set in the Caribbean, New York, and Paris, a novella and eight stories about people who, because of their differences--between men and women, blacks and whites, Caribbeans and visitors, Jews and Christians, rich and poor--misjudge each other.
The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation

Mark Kurlansky
1999

The illuminating story of an ancient and enigmatic people. Despite their obscure origins and small numbers, the Basques have had a profound impact on Europe and the world for more than 2,000 years.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

Mark Kurlansky
1997

Cod spans a thousand years and four continents. From the Vikings, who pursued the codfish across the Atlantic, and the enigmatic Basques, who first commercialized it in medieval times, to Bartholomew Gosnold, who named Cape Cod in 1602, and Clarence Birdseye, who founded an industry on frozen cod in the 1930s, Mark Kurlansky introduces the explorers, merchants, writers, chefs, and of course the fishermen, whose lives have interwoven with this prolific fish. He chronicles the fifteenth-century politics of the Hanseatic League and the cod wars of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. He embellishes his story with gastronomic detail, blending in recipes and lore from the Middle Ages to the present. And he brings to life the cod itself: its personality, habits, extended family, and ultimately the tragedy of how the most profitable fish in history is today faced with extinction. From fishing ports in New England and Newfoundland to coastal skiffs, schooners, and factory ships across the Atlantic; from Iceland and Scandinavia to the coasts of England, Brazil, and West Africa, Mark Kurlansky tells a story that brings world history and human passions into captivating focus. The codfish. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it, and the settlement of North America was driven by it. To the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious than gold. Indeed, the codfish has played a fascinating and crucial role in world history.
A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

Mark Kurlansky
1995

Fifty years after it was bombed to rubble, Berlin is once again a city in which Jews gather for the Passover seder. Paris and Antwerp have recently emerged as important new centers of Jewish culture. Small but proud Jewish communities are revitalizing the ancient centers of Budapest, Prague, and Amsterdam. These brave, determined Jewish men and women have chosen to settle–or remain–in Europe after the devastation of the Holocaust, but they have paid a price. Among the unexpected dangers, they have had to cope with an alarming resurgence of Nazism in Europe, the spread of Arab terrorism, and the impact of the Jewish state on European life.

Delving into the intimate stories of European Jews from all walks of life, Kurlansky weaves together a vivid tapestry of individuals sustaining their traditions, and flourishing, in the shadow of history. An inspiring story of a tenacious people who have rebuilt their lives in the face of incomprehensible horror,A Chosen Few is a testament to cultural survival and a celebration of the deep bonds that endure between Jews and European civilization.
A Continent of Islands: Searching for The Caribbean Destiny

Mark Kurlansky
1992

In this richly detailed portrait of the individual countries and peoples of the Caribbean, Mark Kurlansky brings to life a society and culture often kept hidden from foreigners—the arts, history, politics, and economics of the region, as well as the vivid day-to-day lives of its citizens. From the Newyoriccans of Levittown, Puerto Rico; to the state-salaried popular musicians of Cuba; to the practitioners of good political hurricanemanship (who know how to stretch statistics to bring in relief funds), A Continent of Islands paints portraits that will prove equally fascinating to tourists who know the Caribbean only as a string of beach resorts, and to readers curious about U.S. efforts to influence its neighbors.
International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way Around the World

Mark Kurlansky and Talia Kurlansky
2014

Once a week in the Kurlansky home, Mark spins a globe and wherever his daughter's finger lands becomes the theme of that Friday night's dinner. Their tradition of International Night has afforded Mark an opportunity to share with his daughter, Talia--and now the readers of International Night--the recipes, stories, and insights he's collected over more than thirty years of traveling the world writing about food, culture, and history, and his charming pen-and-ink drawings, which appear throughout the book.

International Night is brimming with recipes for fifty-two special meals--appetizers, a main course, side dishes, and dessert for each--one for every week of the year. Some are old favorites from Mark's repertoire, and others gleaned from research. Always, they are his own version, drawn from techniques he learned as a professional chef and from many years of talking to chefs, producers, and household cooks around the world. Despite these insights, every recipe is designed to be carried out--easily--by any amateur chef, and they are designed to be completed with the assistance of children.
The Story of Salt

Mark Kurlansky and S. D. Schindler
2006

Based on Mark Kurlansky's critically acclaimed bestseller Salt: A World History, this handsome picture book explores every aspect of salt: The many ways it's gathered from the earth and sea; how ancient emperors in China, Egypt, and Rome used it to keep their subjects happy; Why salt was key to the Age of Exploration; what salt meant to the American Revolution; And even how the search for salt eventually led to oil. Along the way, you'll meet a Celtic miner frozen in salt, learn how to make ketchup, and even experience salt's finest hour: Gandhi's famous Salt March.
The Cod's Tale

Mark Kurlansky and S. D. Schindler
2001

Describes the Atlantic cod fish and how it has been fished throughout history to near extinction.
World without Fish

Mark Kurlansky and Frank Stockton
2011

The alarming true story of what's happening to the fish, the oceans and our environment. It tells how and why the fish we most commonly eat, including tuna, salmon, cod and swordfish, could become extinct within fifty years. It is a call to action. With its focus on supporting sustainable fishing it shows how from little steps to big, kids can -- and must make a difference.
My Year Abroad

Chang-rae Lee
2-2-2021

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself. In the breathtaking, “precise, elliptical prose” that Chang-rae Lee is known for (The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller’s outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future. Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion—on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come.
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

Chang-rae Lee
2014

Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
The Surrendered

Chang-rae Lee
2010

Thirty years after vying for the attentions of a beautiful but damaged missionary wife at an orphanage, Korean orphan June Han and former GI Hector Brennan are reunited by a plot that forces them to come to terms with mysterious secrets from their past.
Aloft

Chang-rae Lee
2004

At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can't stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.

Jerry learns that his family's stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.

Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form-the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can't see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.
A Gesture Life: A Novel

Chang-rae Lee
1999

The secret life of a Japanese-American pharmacist in a small town in New York. On the surface a model of propriety and serenity, he is torn by memories of his service in the Japanese army in World War II and the comfort woman he loved and could not save.
Native Speaker

Chang-rae Lee
1995

A clash of ethnic and professional loyalties is the subject of this novel. The protagonist is a Korean-American who works for a private intelligence service and is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician. To blow the whistle on a fellow ethnic would hurt his tribe, on the other hand there is his professional reputation to consider.
Pachinko

Min Jin Lee
2017

"A new tour de force from the bestselling author of Free Food for Millionaires, for readers of The Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone. PACHINKO follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers
Free Food for Millionaires

Min Jin Lee
2007

Free Food For Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.
Songbirds

Christy Lefteri
8-3-2021

From the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, a stunning novel about the disappearance of a Sri Lankan nanny and how the most vulnerable people find their voices. "It began with a crunch of leaves and earth. So early, so cold, the branches shone with ice. I'd returned to collect the songbirds. They are worth more than their weight in gold." Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works on the island as a nanny and maid--having left her native Sri Lanka to try to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind and raised by relatives. But Nisha has vanished; one evening, she steps out on a mysterious errand and doesn't return. The police write off her disappearance as just another runaway domestic worker, so her employer, Petra, undertakes the investigation. Petra's unravelling of Nisha's last days in Cyprus lead her to Nisha's friends--other maids in the neighborhood--and to the darker side of a migrant's life, where impossible choices leave them vulnerable, captive, and worse. Based on the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus, Christy Lefteri has crafted a poignant, deeply empathetic narrative of the human stories behind the headlines. With infinite tenderness and skill, Songbirds offers a triumphant story of the fight for truth and justice, and of women reclaiming their lost voices
The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Christy Lefteri
8-27-2019

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again. Moving, powerful, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo brings home the idea that the most ordinary of lives can be completely upended in unimaginable ways.
A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible

Christy Lefteri
1-1-2010

It is July 1974 and on a bright, sunny morning, the Turkish army has invaded the village of Kyrenia in Cyprus. For many people, this means an end to life as they know it. But for some, it is a chance to begin living again.
The Guinness Book of Ireland

Bernard Loughlin and Colm Tóibín
1995

Six writers - Bernard Loughlin, Colm Toibin, Michael Finlan, Rosita Boland, George O'Brien and Sean Dunne - have combined to produce a book which offers both a guide to the sites and sights of Ireland, and a collection of photographs of its monuments and moods
The Mountains Sing

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
3-7-2020

The multigenerational tale of the Trà̂n family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trà̂n Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that will tear not just her beloved country but her family apart.