Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies has announced the names of five books selected as finalists for the Ann M. Sperber Prize for 2023.
They are: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives: America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists (MIT Press, 2023); Santi Elijah Holley’s An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created (Mariner, 2024); Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir (Mariner, 2023); Alan Philps’, The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War (Pegasus Books, 2023); and Ari Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (HarperOne, 2024).
Honoring a Storied Biographer
The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university.
Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional. It has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.
Professor of Communication and Media Studies Amy Aronson, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said the five finalists emerged from a pool of 48 titles considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be invited to keynote a public award ceremony held at Fordham’s Manhattan campus on November 11. The 6 p.m. event is free and open to the public.
“Our finalists take readers to profound encounters in less-traveled corners of the U.S. and the world,” Aronson said.
“They take us behind the front lines in dangerous conflict zones, reveal hidden stories of journalistic risk-taking, and into carefully researched biographies of public visionaries. All show us the vital importance of journalists and media voices in the world today.”
Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. The most recent winner was The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmsted.
The Finalists
LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives profiles the first generation of women reporters who worked for Science Service, the first news organization in the country dedicated entirely to scientific journalism. LaFollette, author of Science on American Television, reveals that when the Service began in 1921, very few journalism organizations covered science at all, and those that did treated the subject cavalierly, putting any science hobbyist already on staff onto the rare stories deemed important enough to cover. They were all male hobbyists, of course. LaFollette explores how an aspiring and ambitious group of women writers confronted pervasive sexism and gender discrimination to create meaningful careers for themselves while developing a new and increasingly crucial journalistic beat.
Tupac Shakur, the late rapper who was killed in 1996 at the age of 25, was the “spark” for Holley’s An Amerikan Family, which explores the story of the Shakur family and their work for Black liberation in America. Some may be familiar with the rapper’s mother, Assata Shakur, the activist and writer for the Black Panther Party newsletter, living for three decades in Cuban exile, and many have come to know at least something about the iconic Tupac, her son. But Holley, a writer published in the Atlantic, New Republic, Economist, Guardian, and Washington Post, reveals that the branches of the Shakur family tree spread widely and ran deep into the underground of the civil rights struggle. The book is both a family genealogy and a larger story of one community’s struggle for racial justice, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in that quest.
Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment is the memoir of a journalist who has covered nearly every war and humanitarian crisis of our time. A correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Ferguson was in Yemen for the Arab Spring. She managed to report from rebel-held Syria during its civil war despite the ban on foreign journalists. She was one of the last reporters to remain in Afghanistan when the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021. Born and raised a Protestant in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence or grave suffering. Her debut book chronicles the story of a remarkable woman coming into her own in the world’s most perilous and devastating circumstances as she dares to tell the hardest stories on earth as an act of justice.
Philps’ The Red Hotel takes readers inside the experiences of a cadre of American, British, and Australian journalists who reported from Moscow when Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941. They were allowed to stay and report on the war at the Eastern front – as long as their stories were flattering to the Stalin regime. To help ensure this impossibly good press, they were billeted at the luxurious Metropol Hotel and supplied with bottomless vessels of vodka, lavish banquets, and young Russian secretaries and translators who were spies and sometimes prostitutes. Philps, who served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and foreign editor of the Telegraph, reveals that while many of the translators conveyed Kremlin disinformation, some were dissidents who whispered to reporters about the truth of Soviet life and Stalin’s lies.
Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World takes readers around the globe to reveal the stories behind the sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking narratives he reports to his listeners. The co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, this book, his first, takes readers from Turkey to Ukraine to Indonesia to Northern Iraq; from drag shows in Florida to the corridors of power in Washington, DC; from war-torn locales in the Middle East and Africa as he follows the paths of refugees fleeing conflict to big cities and small towns. The result is a memoir-in-essays that is a love letter to journalism and a look at scores of individuals who not only refuse to break but also manage to confront life’s ugliness with beauty, meet horror with humor, and smile in the face of whatever might come next.
For additional information, questions, or press inquiries, please contact Amy Aronson at amaronson@fordham.edu.
