April 26, 1999
Web posted at: 5:48 p.m. EDT (2148 GMT)

(CNN) -- One strong thread seems to bind together the winning works among the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes: history.

And while that's a specific prize category, the winners for biography, current interest, fiction, science and fiction all tend to focus on stories of humanity and its past.

Here are the winners, as announced on Friday night.

"Lindbergh," A. Scott Berg's story of American aviator Charles Lindbergh, has won the biography prize.

In an interview with CNN Interactive last year, Berg said his main goal with the book, "was to sort out the myth from the facts in Lindbergh's life and to convey those facts in as dramatic a fashion as possible."

In the current interest category, the winner is "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," by Philip Gourevitch. The book focuses on the 1994 genocidal killings of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis.

"The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust," Gourevitch writes. "It was the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Winning the fiction prize is W.G. Sebald for "The Rings of Saturn," the diary of a journey that records a series of impossible human strivings.

Sebald discovers, he writes, "traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past." The impact of these "traces" is so powerful that it lands the narrator in hospital -- haunted by the dead and the living. Russell Celyn Jones of The Times of London wrote that the book would "have booksellers running around like headless chickens looking for the appropriate shelf" from which to sell this hard-to-classify novel.

The winner in the history category is "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity," by Roy Porter. It charts the rise of modern medical science -- the emergence of specialties such as anatomy, physiology, neurology, and bacteriology -- and the accompanying development of wider medical practice at the bedside, in the hospital, and in the ambitious public health systems of the 20th century.

Another medical non-fiction book receives the science and technology prize. "Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce" by Douglas Starr is a comprehensive history and analysis of blood banks, transfusions, and research. It begins with the first documented transfusions in France and includes the latest efforts in the development of artificial blood.

The poetry prize has gone to "Mysteries of Small Houses" by Alice Notley, a collection of poems that charts the author's growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. Notley's 20 previous titles include "The Descent of Alette," "Beginning with a Stain," "Homer’s Art" and "Selected Poems."

"Rules of the Road" by Joan Bauer receives the young adult fiction prize. The book tells the story of a gawky 16-year-old girl who drives her crusty old employer from Chicago to Texas on an adventure that teaches them both the rules of the road and the rules of life.

The Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction is awarded to G.S. Godshalk for her "Kalimantaan." It's based on the Englishman Sir James Brooke's establishment of a private raj on the coast of Borneo. In a review, critic Scott Stossel of "The Boston Phoenix" has written, "'Kalimantaan' may be the wisest book about love since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera.' ... It may also be the best historical novel of the past 10 years."

The prizes are meant to acknowledge remarkable achievement in the eight categories. This was the first year young adult fiction was honored. Friday night's awards ceremony kicked off the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books.