Кай Берд - все книги по циклам и сериям | Книги по порядку

On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a turning point in US relations with the Muslim world. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America's most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East--CIA agent Robert Ames. What set Ames apart from every other All-American CIA operative was his extraordinary ability to form deep, meaningful connections with key figures in the Arab world. Others relied on threats or subterfuge, but Ames worked by building friendships and emphasizing shared values.…

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.

"Grey is the color of truth."
So observed Mac Bundy in defending America's intervention in Vietnam. Kai Bird brilliantly captures this ambiguity in his revelatory look at Bundy and his brother William, two of the most influential policymakers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is a portrait of fiercely patriotic, brilliant and brazenly self-confident men who directed a steady escalation of a war they did not believe could be won. Bird draws on seven years of research, nearly one hundred interviews, and scores of still-classified top secret documents in a masterful reevaluation of America's actions throughout the Cold War and Vietnam.

Первая полная и подробная биография "отца атомной бомбы" Дж. Роберта Оппенгеймера — великого и харизматичного ученого, который создал оружие, способное уничтожить мир. Но, осознав последствия своей работы после трагедии Хиросимы и Нагасаки, он начал борьбу за международный контроль над ядерной энергией, а также яростно выступал против разработки водородной бомбы. Оппенгеймера ненавидели высокопоставленные сторонники "ядерного превосходства США", за ним вел непрерывную слежку директор ФБР Эдгар Гувер, изучая каждый его шаг и каждое слово. Репутацию ученого целенаправленно уничтожали, записывая в изменники родины. Однако время все…