“Engaging miniature portraits of overlooked characters and events. . . . Succeed[s] succeeded in explaining the perspectives of two peoples who view the Middle East conflict through different lenses.“
     —The New York Times

“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

“A compelling hybrid of memoir and history . . . kaleidoscopic and captivating.”
     —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is no better way for a foreigner to begin to understand the newly partitioned Jerusalem of 1950 than to read of Bird’s earliest memories.”
     —Christian Science Monitor

KAI BIRD is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Most recently, he co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf). American Prometheus won both the 2006 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Bird is a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post, The Washington Monthly and many other publications. He is presently living in Kathmandu with his wife Susan Goldmark, who is World Bank Country Director for Nepal, and their son.