Books by Kai Bird

Kai Bird is the coauthor with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. His other books include The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). Bird’s many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Kathmandu, Nepal, with his wife and son.

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The most popular books by Kai Bird on 12min

American Prometheus

Kai Bird

For a long time, Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known for building the atomic bomb, was a controversial figure whose life was surrounded by myth and mystery. By gathering records from archives, personal collections, FBI recordings, and interviews with Oppenheimer’s friends, family members, and colleagues, in ‘’American Prometheus,’’ historians Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin reveal who this remarkable individual truly was - how he had led us into the nuclear age and later struggled to eliminate dangers of nuclear war.

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