Winners of the 2003 Ambassador Book Awards

American Studies Winner

In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton won in the American Studies category. Relying on new research into the trial records and diaries and letters, Ms. Norton posits that a combination of political, military and religious factors caused the hysterical fits and defiant behavior that culminated in the infamous trials. According to Publishers' Weekly, "Part of the originality of this study lies in Norton's refusal to read events through the lens of contemporary psychology, offering instead a lively account of the ways 17th-century men and women would have thought about them."

Biography & Autobiography Winner

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles won in the Biography category. Historian Stiles presents the case that Jesse James was a terrorist, motivated by political urges, not just a bandit. "He was," Stiles says, "a political partisan [who] eagerly offered himself up as a polarizing symbol of the Confederate project for postwar Missouri."

Fiction Winner

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides won in the Fiction category. This novel is engaged with American immigrants’ experience in Detroit in the 1920s and ‘30s and subsequent financial success and merging into American culture, while at the same time upending the stereotypes of gender and genetics.

Poetry Winner

Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot won in the Poetry category. According to Publishers’ Weekly, “Ponsot's poems are built around...unflinching observations of intimate interactions and misfires, whether of familial relations ventriloquized through updated Greek dramatis personae, a French woman's accommodation of her mother's married lover or the self's castings about the natural world, ‘space recast as flatness, long diminishings of blue borne lightly.’” Miss Ponsot read a draft of a new poem at the ceremony, providing a rare opportunity to hear a poet recite a work in progress.

The Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

The Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred on historian Edmund S. Morgan. Mr. Morgan’s latest book is Benjamin Franklin, which is uniquely based on Franklin’s actual correspondence.