Robert Skidelsky Wins Council’s First Arthur Ross Book Award

Contact: Lisa Shields, Director of Communications, 212-434-9888

NEW YORK, May 1, 2002 – Robert Skidelsky, author of John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937-1946 (Viking) has won the Council’s first Arthur Ross Book Award, America’s newest and largest international affairs book award. As gold medalist, he will receive $10,000 and be honored at a dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations in June.

“It seems to us particularly fitting that this significant prize comes into being at a time when the world’s attention is so focused on difficult issues of foreign policy, which affect all of our lives on a daily basis,” said literary agent Morton L. Janklow, chairman of the award jury.

Lawrence Freedman, author of Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford University Press) is the silver medalist and will receive $5,000. Council Senior Fellow Walter Russell Mead, author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Knopf) has won honorable mention.

The award was endowed by Arthur Ross in 2001 to honor a non-fiction work from any recent year, in English or in translation, which merits special attention for its analysis of important events, its contribution to solving pressing political or economic problems, or its impact in galvanizing new thinking about the way long-standing issues of international concern are viewed.