From RH:

Scott Simon is the son of comedian Ernest Simon and Pat Simon, the most beautiful woman in Chicago. He is the host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He has covered ten wars, from El Salvador to Iraq, and has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody and the Emmy. His memoir, Home and Away, rose to the top of the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, was named Barnes & Noble's Sports Book of the Year. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughters.

Scott Simon was born .... The son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons, Simon grew up in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, DC. He attended the University of Chicago and McGill University, and he has received a number of honorary degrees.

Scott Simon joined NPR in 1977 as chief of its Chicago bureau and is currently the Host of Weekend Edition Saturday. He has reported from all 50 states, covered presidential campaigns and ten wars, and reported from Central America, Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. He has received numerous honors for his reporting.

Simon has written for The New York Times' Book Review and Opinion sections, the Wall Street Journal opinion page, The Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet Magazine.

He has been married to Caroline Richard since the summer of 2002.

Taken From NPR--Let’s edit it:

From Ground Zero in New York to ground zero in Kabul, to police stations, subway platforms, and darkened theaters, NPR's Peabody-Award-winning correspondent Scott Simon brings a well-traveled perspective to his role as host of Weekend Edition Saturday.

Simon joined NPR in 1977 as chief of its Chicago bureau. Since then, he has reported from all 50 states, covered presidential campaigns and eight wars, and reported from Central America, Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. In 2002, Simon took leave of his usual post at Weekend Edition Saturday to cover the war in Afghanistan for NPR. He has also reported from Central America on the continuing wars in that region; from Cuba on the nation's resistance to change; from Ethiopia on the country's famine and prolonged civil war; from the Middle East during the Gulf War; and from the siege of Sarajevo and the destruction of Kosovo.

Simon has received numerous honors for his reporting. His work was part of the Overseas Press Club and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards NPR earned for coverage of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. He was part of the NPR news teams that won prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for covering the war in Kosovo as well as the Gulf War. In 1989, he won a George Foster Peabody Award for his weekly radio essays. The award commended him for his sensitivity and literary style in coverage of events including the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and the San Francisco earthquake. Simon also accepted the Presidential End Hunger Award for his series of reports on the 1987-1988 Ethiopian civil war and drought. He received a 1986 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his coverage of racism in a South Philadelphia neighborhood, and a 1986 Silver Cindy for a report on conditions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's detention center in Harlingen, Texas.

Simon received a Major Armstrong Award in 1979 for his coverage of the American Nazi Party rally in Chicago, and a Unity Award in Media in 1978 for his political reporting on All Things Considered. He also won a 1982 Emmy for the public television documentary The Patterson Project, which examined the effects of President Reagan's budget cuts on the lives of 12 New Jersey residents.

Simon has been a frequent guest host of the CBS television program Nightwatch and CNBC's TalkBack Live. In addition to hosting Weekend Edition Saturday, Simon has appeared as an essayist and commentator on NBC's Weekend Today and NOW with Bill Moyers. He has hosted many public television programs, including “Voices of Vision,” “Life on the Internet,” “State of Mind,” “American Pie,” “Search for Common Ground,” and specials on privacy in America and democracy in the Middle East. He also narrated the documentary film "Lincoln of Illinois" for PBS. Simon participated in the Grammy Award-nominated 50th anniversary remake of The War of the Worlds (co-starring Jason Robards), and hosted public television's coverage of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Simon has hosted the BBC series Eyewitness, which was seen in the United States on the Discovery Channel, and a BBC special on the White House press corps. Simon was also a featured co-anchor of PBS's millennium special broadcast in 2000.

Simon has written for The New York Times' Book Review and Opinion sections, the Wall Street Journal opinion page, The Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet Magazine.

The son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons, Simon grew up in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, DC. He attended the University of Chicago and McGill University, and he has received a number of honorary degrees.

Simon's book Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan was published in the spring of 2000 by Hyperion, a division of Disney. It topped the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list for several weeks, and was cited as one of the best books of the year in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and several other publications. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, kicked off the prestigious Wiley Turning Points series in September of 2002. Simon’s first novel, Pretty Birds, about female teenaged snipers in Sarajevo, was released in May 2005 to very strong, positive reviews.

In the summer of 2000, Simon married Caroline Richard. His hobbies are Mexican cooking, ballet, book collecting, and living and dying for the Chicago Cubs (and now the French national soccer team).

Scott Simon, the award-winning correspondent and host of NPR's "Weekend Edition," isn't who he seems on the radio. That, and he's been keeping some of his strongest skills close to his vest. It's the only way to explain the force and magnitude of his first novel, "Pretty Birds."

On the surface there couldn't be more distance between Simon and Irena Zaric, the 17-year-old protagonist of his novel. Wholesome and sturdy, Simon inspires trust in the same way that Walter Cronkite once did. Irena, a boisterous, carefree, high-school basketball star in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, devours the latest gossip about Madonna and Johnny Depp, worships Michael Jordan and seems more concerned with training her parrot, Pretty Bird, to imitate the sound of a ball swooshing through a hoop than with the politics of a country on the verge of chaos.

Where these two meet and really begin to resemble each other is through the harsh realities of war. Few would peg Simon as a hardened correspondent who's covered 10 conflicts. He just doesn't seem suited to be our man on the ground, interviewing soldiers and their intended and unintended casualties; too mild-mannered and brimming with humanity for such gruesome work.

Irena seems an even less likely candidate to become a sniper, shouldering a gun, dressed in black and hiding on a rooftop. But that's exactly how Simon introduces her in the opening pages of this gripping coming-of-age thriller. She's just a kid, pulling the trigger, then returning to her dog-eared copies of Cosmopolitan.

It's not the sexy, make-believe world of Jennifer Garner in the television series "Alias." Teenage women actually served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian forces during the war in Sarajevo. After Simon interviewed one of them, he decided to build a novel around what he imagined the rest of her life might be like. In the process he lays waste to the reference points Westerners hold regarding regional conflicts. By looking at ethnic cleansing from a side window, through the uncluttered eyes of a sympathetic girl, as recognizable as any friend or family member, we feel intimacy and a disturbing amount of dislocation. There's also a surprisingly large dose of gallows humor that's neither forced nor contrived.

Once Simon establishes Irena's horrible rooftop work, he takes us back to the spring of 1992, when Irena, her family and Pretty Bird have to escape across the river to the Serbian side of the city. In the same way that the movie "Hotel Rwanda" detailed the life of refugees in harm's way, Simon's portrait of a family holding life together in funny, familiar and bizarre ways establishes "Pretty Birds" as an important document describing a specific time and place. The decline of everyday comforts, beginning with heat and lights, spirals into ditch-digging for the military and stealing money from the pockets of dead men. It's an almost casual, natural progression to that trigger task on the roof.

When Pretty Bird is set free, her flight back to the family's old home sets up the story's climactic, sweeping conclusion. Simon's novel is a cliffhanger, a deeply moving rebuke of war and a heartbreaking tale about the bonds of friendship.

July 3, 2005

The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)

Growing Up Through A Sniper Scope

Joe Kurmaskie