Crossing Mandelbaum Gate - by Kai Bird (Paperback)

About the Book

Pulitzer Prize-winner Kai Bird's vivid memoir of an American childhood spent in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Jerusalem and Saudia Arabia.

Book Synopsis

*From the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus--the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer*

Now with a new introduction, Kai Bird's fascinating memoir of his early years spent in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon provides an original and illuminating perspective into the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In 1956, four-year-old Kai Bird, son of a charming American diplomat, moved to Jerusalem with his family. Kai could hear church bells and the Muslim call to prayer and watch as donkeys and camels competed with cars for space on the narrow streets. Each day on his way to school, Kai was driven through Mandelbaum Gate, where armed soldiers guarded the line separating Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem from Arab-controlled East.

Bird would spend much of his life crossing such lines--as a child in Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and later, as a young man in Lebanon. In Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, a narrative that "rips along like a spy novel" (The New York Times Book Review), Bird's retelling of "events such as Suez in 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, and Black September in 1970 are as clear and fresh as yesterday" (The Spectator, UK). Bird vividly portrays emblematic figures like George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening; Jordan's King Hussein; the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled; Salem bin Laden; Saudi King Faisal; President Nasser of Egypt; and Hillel Kook, the forgotten rescuer of more than 100,000 Jews during World War II.

Bird, his parents sympathetic to Palestinian self-determination and his wife the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, has written a "kaleidoscopic and captivating" (Publishers Weekly) personal history of a troubled region and an indispensable addition to the literature on the modern Middle East.

Review Quotes

"Acute and engaging... Bird puts me somewhat in mind of Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place.... Bird devotes the last third of his text to a reconstruction of his Austrian Jewish wife's family history during and after the Shoah. His intention here is as admirable as it is plain, and these pages contain some stirring and even uplifting material about human survival. But this serves only to make his genuine evenhandedness more poignant."--Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

"Engaging and insightful... Crossing Mandelbaum Gate is a compelling corrective that can force even reluctant readers to look at the Middle East anew.... A powerful and unflinching book."--James Gibney, The American Scholar

About the Author

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.