
Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, best known for his biographies of political figures. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, the Duff Cooper Prize, a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Contributing Editor of The Nation magazine. Bird was born in 1951. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Bombay. 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 now lives in Miami Beach, Florida with his wife, Susan Goldmark, and their son, Joshua.
Books

Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb
2025

Hiroshima's Shadow
1996

The Good Spy
The Life and Death of Robert Ames
2014

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate
Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978
2010

The Outlier
The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
2021

American Prometheus
The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
2005

The Chairman
John J McCloy & The Making of the American Establishment
1992

The Color of Truth
McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms
1998