Kai Bird

Kai Bird (born September 2, 1951) is an American author and columnist, best known for his works on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, United States-Middle East political relations, and his biographies of political figures. He won a Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Biography
Bird was born in 1951 in Eugene, Oregon. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and Bird spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo, and Mumbai. His father named him after Kai-Yu Hsu, a refugee from Communist China he met at the University of Oregon. Kai means "mustard" in Chinese (; Mandarin:  or ).

Bird finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1973 and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird now lives in New York City with his wife, Susan Goldmark, a retired country director of the World Bank. They have a son, Joshua.

In January 2017, Bird was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY Graduate Center's Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City.

Literary career
After graduating from Carleton, Bird received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which enables students to do a year of independent study outside the United States. He used the fellowship to do a photojournalism project in Yemen. Two years later, his wife Goldmark was also awarded a Watson Fellowship, and the two of them spent 15 months as freelance journalists traveling through Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. "We filed weekly stories with papers like the Christian Science Monitor and Hong Kong's Far Eastern Economic Review," Bird says. "We hardly made any money, but we enjoyed what we were doing." Bird was an associate editor of The Nation magazine from 1978 to 1982 and then a columnist for the magazine.

Published works
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 book 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 in the April 18, 1983, truck bombing of the American embassy in Beirut.

In 2021 he published a biography of Jimmy Carter entitled The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Awards
Bird is a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1973), an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship (1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), and a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Grant for Research and Writing (1993–95). In 2001-2002 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). He and Sherwin also won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for their biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 2008, they also won the Duff Cooper Prize.

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in the "Autobiography" category.

In September 2016, he was the featured speaker at Carleton College's opening convocation in Northfield, Minnesota.

References

External links

Kai Bird's articles for The Nation
https://web.archive.org/web/20090105200954/http://slowdog.com/journEx_KaiBird.html
Audio interview with Kai Bird and excerpt from Crossing Mendelbaum Gate at NPR

1951 births
20th-century American biographers
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American biographers
21st-century American male writers
American columnists
American male biographers
Carleton College alumni
CUNY Graduate Center faculty
Kodaikanal International School alumni
Living people
Medill School of Journalism alumni
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Watson Fellows
Writers from Eugene, Oregon