1999 SEBA Book Award Winners

Fiction

Tim Gautreaux
Picador USA
January 1999 $14
0312199368

Bringing the same light and gentle understanding that he did to the story collection "Same Place, Same Things, author Tim Gautreaux tells the tale of Paul and Colette, star-crossed and factious lovers struggling to make it in rural south Louisiana. When Colette, fed up with small town life, perceives yet another indiscretion by the fun-loving Paul, she heads for Los Angeles, with big dreams and Paul in tow. Paul's attempts to draw his beautiful young wife back home to the Cajun bayou, and back to his heart, make up a tale filled with warmth, devotion and majestically constructed scenes of Southern life.

Nonfiction

Tony Horwitz
Vintage Books
February 1999 $14.95
067975833X

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.
Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.
In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'
Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

Cookbook

No award was given in this category in 1999

Poetry

Andrew Glaze
Black Belt Press
April 1998 $25
188132091X

This book is sure to wake up anyone who is bored with contemporary poetry. In this selection of Glaze's strongest work, past and present, he embraces ideas, controversy, despair, elation, loss, and surprise.

Children's

Debra Frasier
Harcourt Children's Books
March 1998 $16
0152588493

Open this book and you'll be walking along the ocean shore, looking for all kinds of special things. Some will be small enough to fit in your hand--like shells and sea glass. Others--like the sun and the sky and the waves--will be too big to carry home. But no matter what your journey holds, you'll soon learn that "looking for the ocean's treasures can be as important as finding them.
Debra Frasier, author-illustrator of the bestselling "On the Day You Were Born, invites you along on this beach journey of discovery.