Canada’s Timothy Brook has won a major history prize in the United States for his book Vermeer’s Hat: The 17th Century and the Dawn of the Global World. The award, the Lukas Prize Project for Exceptional Works of Nonfiction, is given annually by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Brook was awarded the $10,000 Mark Lynton history prize.Brook, who grew up in Toronto and now is principal of St. John’s College at University of British Columbia in Vancouver as well as holding the Shaw Chair in Chinese Studies at Oxford University, is an internationally renowned China scholar.
Brook latches on to physical details in the domestic life of Vermeer’s subjects and traces the threads of maritime commerce that brought them to Delft, illuminating in the process a vast and intricate economic web and demonstrating that centuries before the concept of ‘globalization,’ merchants and traders had knit the distant corners of the planet together.
Other recipients of the awards include an examination of the Bush administration’s decision to use torture in the war on terror, and the price paid by the United States for this abandonment of its first principles, by Jane Mayer and an account of the Navajo nation, and how the government mined their land for uranium and contaminated their environment with radiation, by Judy Pasternak, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times
Established in 1998, the prizes recognize excellence in nonfiction writing that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the awards’ Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997.
