Stuff
Product Details
Scribner, April 2010
Hardcover, 448 pages
ISBN-10: 1416544402
ISBN-13: 9781416544401
Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER 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.
Weeks before the Suez War of 1956, four-year-old Kai Bird, son of a garrulous, charming American Foreign Service officer, moved to Jerusalem with his family. They settled in a small house, where young 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. He had a front-seat view to both sides of a divided city—and the roots of the widening conflict between Arabs and Israelis.
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. Crossing Mandelbaum Gate is his compelling personal history of growing up an American in the midst of three major wars and three turbulent decades in the Middle East. The Zelig-like Bird brings readers into such conflicts as the Suez War, the Six Day War of 1967, and the Black September hijackings in 1970 that triggered the Jordanian civil war. Bird vividly portrays such emblematic figures as the erudite George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening; Jordan's King Hussein; the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled; Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother and a family friend; 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 masterful and highly accessible book—at once a vivid chronicle of a life spent between cultures as well as a consummate history of a region in turmoil. It is an indispensable addition to the literature on the modern Middle East.
Read more:
Browse Inside Crossing Mandelbaum GateHow did you come to write this book?
Though I spent most of my childhood in the Arab world, as a journalist and historian I have avoided the topic. I admit this was an abdication, but as a young man I learned that the Middle East is an emotional black hole. But then in 1991 I wrote a rather personal Op Ed for the Washington Post, trying to convey my feelings about the region as it plunged into yet another war. My Jewish American wife thought it was the best piece of writing I had ever done. She encouraged me to think about writing this memoir--and I finally got around to it after American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin) came out in 2005--and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. I'm glad I did it--though I learned that a memoir is a very different beast than biography.
"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
"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
"Kai Bird has stepped back from the dreaded Middle Eastern present to create a spellbinding portrait of an earlier time. He grew up on the seam between Arabs and Israelis, an American in the heyday of American innocence and power. He has not adorned that past, for he was there when the region's current ordeal was hatched, but he has given a bittersweet rendition of a world now irretrievably gone. A beautiful memoir, and a supremely honest one." —Professor Fouad Ajami, The School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
"A wonderfully intimate account, which reminds us that the path to peace passes through the gate of personal narrative. We need not agree with Bird's analysis to be moved by his story and allow it to help us walk through that gate." —Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, author of You Don't Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right
"A compelling hybrid of memoir and history… kaleidoscopic and captivating."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Bird's acute and engaging memoir is a mournful recollection of a time when the single issue of Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew, was not the monotonously dominant theme that it has since become…. He is adroit, modest, ironic, and amusing… Bird puts me somewhat in mind of Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place."—Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
"Illuminating . . . poignant . . . A fascinating book about a crucial period in the Middle East."—Mike O'Connor, Washington Post
"The book rips along like a spy novel . . . [Bird] has succeeded in explaining the perspectives of two peoples who view the Middle East conflict through different lenses."—Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times Book Review
"An extraordinarily rich and pleasurable memoir, a worthy addition to the literature of Middle Eastern ex-pats that ranges from Charles M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta to Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem . . . I simply could not put it down."—Jonathan Kirsch, The Jewish Journal
Library Journal, March 11, 2011
...who left the Jim Crow South starting in the early 20th century and spread throughout the country. Autobiography Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 (Scribner), whose author, the ...
Washington Post, April 24, 2010
...CROSSING MANDELBAUM GATE Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 By Kai Bird Scribner. 424 pp. $30 Kai Bird begins his memoir in Jerusalem in 1956, when the city ...
NPR, April 21, 2010
...Kai Bird co-authored American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nilgun Tolek Kai Bird co-authored American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. text size A ...
New York Times, April 17, 2010
...playing the conquer the world board game Risk as an adolescent growing up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, Kai Bird avoided occupying the Middle East. So did his American friends. Their very surroundings schooled them in the difficulty of ...
New York Times, April 17, 2010
...playing the ?conquer the world? board game Risk as an adolescent growing up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, Kai Bird avoided occupying the Middle East. So did his American friends. Their very surroundings schooled them in the difficulty of ...
New York Times, April 16, 2010
...playing the “conquer the world” board game Risk as an adolescent growing up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, Kai Bird avoided occupying the Middle East. So did his American friends. Their very surroundings schooled them in the difficulty of ...
Kai Bird's Books
-
The Color of Truth"Grey is the color of truth." So observed Mac Bundy in defending America's intervention in Vietnam. Kai Bird brilliantly captures this ambiguity in...Read More
Displaying 1 of
