And the envelope please ...

The Pulitzer Committee announced this week its awards for the best books of the year:

*Michael Cunningham won the fiction prize for "The Hours," a novel that weaves together the lives of three woman and Virginia Woolf's classic "Mrs. Dalloway."

*The history prize was given to "Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898," by history professors Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace. It chronicles New York from the days of the Lenape Indians to the era when it rose to be "capital of the world."

*The prize for biography went to "Lindbergh," by A. Scott Berg about the aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose solo flight from New York to Paris still captures the imagination of a space shuttle generation.

*John McPhee won the general nonfiction prize for "Annals of the Former World," a geologic epic about Earth's formation.