American experience in the Middle East. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown, 2014) is a biography of CIA officer Robert Ames, whose career focus was the Middle East. According to the book, Ames played a key role in starting the peace process that led to the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. Ames perished in the April 18, 1983 truck bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. In 2021 he published a biography on Jimmy Carter entitled The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Awards Bird is a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1973), an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship (1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), and a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Grant for Research and Writing (1993–95). In 2001-2002 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). He and Sherwin also won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for their biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 2008, they also won the Duff Cooper Prize. Crossing Mandelbaum Gate was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in the "Autobiography" category. In September 2016, he was the featured speaker at Carleton College's opening convocation in Northfield, Minnesota. References External links Kai Bird's articles for The Nation https://web.archive.org/web/20090105200954/http://slowdog.com/journEx_KaiBird.html Audio interview with Kai Bird and excerpt from Crossing Mendelbaum Gate at NPR 20th-century American biographers American male biographers American columnists Medill School of Journalism alumni Carleton College alumni Kodaikanal International School alumni Graduate Center, CUNY faculty Living people Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners 1951 births Watson Fellows Writers from Eugene, Oregon 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American biographers 21st-century American male writers