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Kai Bird, Recommending BestBooksauthor

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Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist best known for his biographies of political figures. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, the Duff Cooper Prize, a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Contributing Editor of The Nation magazine. 

The bird was born in 1951. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo, and Bombay. He finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and an M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird now lives in Miami Beach, Florida, with his wife, Susan Goldmark, and their son, Joshua.

Bird's biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (Touchstone, 1998), The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (Random House, 1992), and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz.

In April 2010, his Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978, was released by Scribner. It is a meld of memoir and history, fusing his early life in the Arab world with an account of the American experience in the Middle East.

The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown, 2014) is a biography of CIA officer Robert Ames, whose career focus was the Middle East. According to the book, Ames played a key role in starting the peace process that led to the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. Ames perished on April 18, 1983, during the truck bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. In 2021 he published a biography on Jimmy Carter entitled The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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American Prometheus

David Blaine
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