Good Spy (Bird) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where— Eugene, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Carleton College; M.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Miami Beach, Florida and/or Lima, Peru


Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures.

Kai Bird was born in Eugene, Oregon. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Mumbai. 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 a M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird is married to Susan Goldmark, country director of the World Bank. They have a son.

Literary career
After graduation 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, 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 1978–82 and then a Nation columnist.

Published works
Bird's biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998), The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (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 was released in 2014.

Recognition
Bird is a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1973), an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship (1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), 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 in biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005). He and Sherwin also won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for their biography of 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. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/12/14.)