A CELEBRATION AMID the rubble. A feast in a time of famine. No matter what metaphor you choose, the Pulitzer Prize awarded to book critic Gail Caldwell on Monday couldn’t have come at a better time for the financially challenged Boston Globe.

Caldwell won the Pulitzer in criticism after having been a finalist three times previously — a record of frustration, to be sure (“I’ve gotten really good at losing,” she says, laughing), but also a sign of consistent excellence.

This year is shaping up as an ugly one for the newspaper business, and that ugliness has not spared the Globe. Last week, the paper’s corporate parent, the New York Times Company, announced a morale-sapping downsizing effort. Veteran employees will be offered buyouts. And the Globe itself, which has already jettisoned its Sunday New England and Home & Garden sections, may — in a cruel irony — fold its Sunday stand-alone book section into the Focus section, although not necessarily with fewer reviews.

“There is not a final decision on that, but it is looking that way,” says editor Matt Storin. “We clearly don’t like doing that.” He adds that if such a move is made, he hopes it will be temporary.

Caldwell’s is the first Globe Pulitzer since 1997, when columnist Eileen McNamara won in the commentary category. As much as he’d like to win every year (Caldwell’s prize is the fourth Pulitzer of Storin’s eight-year tenure at the top of the masthead), Storin says he understands that the process is “subjective.” Last year, for instance, he thinks the Globe had an unusually strong portfolio, led by reporter Mitchell Zuckoff and photographer Suzanne Kreiter’s series on a young child with Down syndrome and an investigative project on AIDS in Africa — yet the Globe was shut out.

Caldwell and Storin say they learned of the Pulitzer while scanning the wires in the Globe newsroom on Monday afternoon. The news was followed by a party attended by about 200 people in “the Link,” a large, wood-paneled function room, where Caldwell, Storin, and publisher Richard Gilman spoke. Also honored was op-ed-page columnist Derrick Jackson, a finalist in the commentary category (about which more below).

A native of Amarillo, Texas, and a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Caldwell lived in Austin and San Francisco before deciding to make a life for herself as a writer. “I had this kind of Texas romantic notion that you had to move East to do that,” she says, recalling that she arrived in Boston at the age of 30 “with no job and no place to live.”

Her aim, she says, is to use her book reviews as a framework on which to build something more lasting.

“I’ve always loved the idea of the essay in the 19th-century sense of the word,” says Caldwell, who wrote theater and book reviews for the Boston Phoenix in the early 1980s before joining the Globe full-time in 1985. The idea, she says, is to “use the essay form to write about the world at large” — to write about “the range of human experience, and not just whether to buy this book.”

Monday was a good day at 135 Morrissey Boulevard. There may not be that many others in the coming weeks.

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The Pulitzer judges’ choice of the Rutland Herald in the editorial-writing category may be a good omen for gay-marriage activists in Massachusetts.

It was only last week that Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) filed a lawsuit seeking legal protection for same-sex couples in the Bay State (see “This Just In,” News and Features, April 13). And Rutland Herald editorial-page editor David Moats’s low-key, thoughtful, but emphatic series in favor of what ultimately became Vermont’s civil-union law could serve as a template for how to advance the debate here.

Moats’s editorials politely revealed the flaws in perhaps the two most reasonable-sounding arguments against granting lesbian and gay couples the same rights as heterosexual couples: the notion that the courts should stay out of the political arena (advanced by the Boston Herald last Friday) and the idea that legislators have no business defying the wishes of their constituents.

The first matter was addressed right out of the gate in December 1999, within days of the Vermont Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex couples deserve the same legal benefits as heterosexual couples. While lauding the court for leaving it up to the legislature how to achieve that equality, Moats emphasized that it is the court system’s duty to protect the rights of the minority from oppression by the majority. “It was a brave ruling, characterized both by boldness and restraint,” he wrote.

Four months later, with the matter having moved to the legislature, Moats opined that though elected officials are obliged to listen, they ultimately must follow their own conscience and judgment. “How could any of us say we have any convictions at all if we were to let the majority of our neighbors determine what our convictions are?” he asked.

The Boston Herald may be a hopeless case. But the Globe’s stand will be crucial as GLAD’s suit wends its way through the courts and, most likely, the legislature. The Globe supported civil unions in Vermont, and will almost certainly be a friendly voice for gay rights in Massachusetts as well. The question is whether Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth will push for an endorsement of full marriage rights or settle for the separate-but-equal status of civil unions. That would be a step further than her predecessor, David Greenway, was willing to go — but it would be the right thing to do.

It would also be a step further than the Rutland Herald took. Even so, Loth would do well to study David Moats’s civilized, and civilizing, approach.

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What can you say when an old nemesis wins a Pulitzer? I’ll say this: congratulations.

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz is best known locally for her campaign on behalf of Gerald Amirault, Cheryl LeFave, and their late mother, Violet Amirault, all of whom were convicted in the mid 1980s of molesting children at the Fells Acres day-care center in Malden, of which Violet Amirault was the owner. LeFave is now free, her sentence having been reduced to time served; her brother remains in prison.

Starting in 1995, Rabinowitz has written numerous articles alleging that the charges against the Amirault family were figments of the children’s imaginations, prodded by overzealous investigators.

I disagree. Based on the findings of an official review of the case and my own independent research, including interviews with two of the victims’ parents, I believe Rabinowitz has consistently mischaracterized the strong evidence against the Amiraults.

Nevertheless, I think Rabinowitz was a worthy choice for the Pulitzer in commentary. Her work is dauntingly intelligent, deeply reported and researched, eloquently written, and invariably contrarian, whether she’s writing about Fells Acres, the presidential campaign, or a dubious “unwanted sex” case at Brandeis.

The choice of Rabinowitz indicates a refreshing seriousness on the part of the Pulitzer board, which rejected three finalists proposed by the contest jury — including the Globe’s Derrick Jackson, who espouses political correctness of the most conventional kind, and who is too often content to chew superficially on the news of the day. (To be fair, Jackson has also done some excellent work on the woefully low graduation rates of college athletes, who are disproportionately African-American.)

Like Gail Caldwell, Rabinowitz had been a three-time finalist before winning this week — indicating that she’s had not just a good year, but a good career as well.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001