Eleanor Randolph on Michael Bloomberg

Eleanor Randolph is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics and the media for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers. As a member of the New York Times editorial staff (1998 to 2018), she focused on city and state politics, media, and Russia. The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg (Simon & Schuster) Randolph’s account of Bloomberg’s life and time, reads like a novel, a quintessentially American story. It follows Bloomberg from a modest Jewish middle- class upbringing to Harvard MBA to Salomon Brothers hot shot to creator of the machine that would change Wall Street, and with it, the financial universe, and make him a billionaire. And then there’s New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his attempts at education reform, contract control, anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, green climate control, and his political adventures with both aides and opponents. After his third term, back to his business, Bloomberg doubles its worth. Publisher’s Weekly review noted that in this “admiring but not sugarcoated biography […] [Randolph] unearths a complex, prickly personality beneath Bloomberg’s uncharismatic surface. […] The result is a vivid, timely study of Bloomberg’s brand of plutocracy. “

Kai Bird is the Executive Director of CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. He co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy—and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis. His most recent book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. He is currently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter.