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.
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