AP (L)
Congratulations to Andrew Solomon, who has won the Lukas Book Prize for one of the most acclaimed books of 2012: Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, in which Solomon interviewed hundreds of subjects for a study of how parents cope with extraordinary children, whether they are deaf, autistic, suffering from Down Syndrome, or transgender. The $10,000 prize, administered by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, also named a finalist: Cynthia Carr, for Fire in the Belly, a biography of the New York artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. Robert Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the fourth volume of his grand history of the American president, received the Mark Lynton History prize, and David Nasaw's The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, was named a finalist. Also, the judges gave the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award to reporter Beth Macy for her book about a Virginia furniture store owner threatened with the loss of his business.