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.
It is an indispensable addition to the literature on the modern Middle East..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He had a front-seat view to both sides of a divided city--and the roots of the widening conflict Between Arabs and Israelis.
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.
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.
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.
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
