Bilger burkhard biography for kids pictures

Follow to get new release updates, special offers including promotional offers and improved recommendations. I've been a working journalist for nearly forty years and a Staff Writer at the New Yorker since Both are rooted in my family history. I was born and raised in Oklahoma but grew up speaking German at home—my parents had emigrated to the United States in In almost everything I write, I try to understand people with lives quite different from mine, and to see the world, for just a moment, through their eyes.

I've been a working journalist for nearly forty years and a Staff Writer at the New Yorker since I'm the author of two books: Noodling for Flatheads.

After graduating from high school, I came east to study English and French at Yale. I went on to work as a science and environmental editor and reporter for more than twenty years, covering stories on five continents. At the New Yorker, I've written about everything from gem dealers in Madagascar to ginseng poachers in the Appalachians, deep-cave divers in Mexico, and a cheese-making nun in Connecticut.

My first book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a collection of stories about my adventures in the Deep South. It looked at old rural traditions like coonhunting and cockfighting and tried to see what they could tell us about our changing American values. How is it that Abraham Lincoln was once a cockfighting referee and Andrew Jackson hosted cockfights in the White House, yet the sport is now illegal in every state?

Fatherland is about the other half of my heritage. I began work on the book in , when I moved to Berlin with my family for a year to do research. Fatherland is part memoir and part detective story. It's a book about how good people can be seduced by bad ideas and how their descendants can come to terms with that guilt. I sing and play guitar and have made music my whole life.