Superman (Lib)(CD)

Tye, Larry

BOOKS ON TAPE]

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping group portrait of the pioneers and longtime kings of jazz--Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong, and Count Basie--who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers in America. This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. <ul> <li>Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.</li> <li>Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.</li> <li>William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans--the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.</li> </ul> What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like so many black performers of their &nbsp;day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries not by waging war over every slight, which never would have worked in that Jim Crow era, but by opening America's eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement. Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country's most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.

The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America

Humor & Entertainment

Mariner Books

The definitive biography of the most dangerous demagogue in American history, based on exclusive access to his papers and recently unsealed transcripts of his closed-door Congressional hearings\nIn the long history of American demagogues, from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use “McCarthyism” to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. His chaotic, meteoric rise is a gripping and terrifying object lesson for us all. Yet his equally sudden fall from fame offers hope that, given the rope, most American demagogues eventually hang themselves. Only now, through best-selling author Larry Tye’s look at the senator’s records, can the full story be told.

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

The Father of Spin is the first full-length biography of the legendary Edward L. Bernays, who, beginning in the 1920s, was one of the first and most successful practitioners of the art of public relations. This book tells of Bernays's great campaigns, including: His precedent-setting work for the American Tobacco Company, climaxed by a parade of cigarette-smoking debutantes down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday that recast smoking as an act of liberation for women, helped convince a generation of women to light up, and made headlines from coast to coast. He transformed the color green into an American favorite to blend in with the green of the Lucky Strike package, and he convinced weight-conscious women that a cigarette was just the thing to substitute for a sweet. And he did it all without anyone knowing his client was behind it. How he and his client the United Fruit Company helped engineer the overthrow of the socialist regime in Guatemala in the 1950s. How he borrowed ideas from his uncle Sigmund Freud to push people to buy products they didn't need and to shape the way they perceived issues and the very way they believed. And what Bernays did for tobacco and fruit peddlers, he also did for politicians, including Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. In The Father of Spin, Boston Globe reporter Larry Tye, drawing on interviews with primary sources and voluminous private papers, presents a fascinating and revealing portrait of the man who, more than any other, defined and personified public relations, a profession that today helps shape our political discourse and define our commercial choices.

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

History

Crown

“A multilayered, inspiring portrait of RFK . . . [the] most in-depth look at an extraordinary figure whose transformational story shaped America.”—Joe Scarborough, The Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu original series starring Chris Pine. Larry Tye appears on CNN’s American Dynasties: The Kennedys. “We are in Larry Tye’s debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who . . . almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans.”—David Nasaw, The New York Times Book Review Bare-knuckle operative, cynical White House insider, romantic visionary—Robert F. Kennedy was all of these things at one time or another, and each of these aspects of his personality emerges in the pages of this powerful and perceptive biography. History remembers RFK as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy’s enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that began with his service as counsel to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to capture the full arc of his subject’s life. Tye draws on unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files, and fifty-eight boxes of papers that had been under lock and key for forty years. He conducted hundreds of interviews with RFK intimates, many of whom have never spoken publicly, including Bobby’s widow, Ethel, and his sister, Jean. Tye’s determination to sift through the tangle of often contradictory opinions means that Bobby Kennedy will stand as the definitive biography about the most complex and controversial member of the Kennedy family. Praise for Bobby Kennedy “A compelling story of how idealism can be cultivated and liberalism learned . . . Tye does an exemplary job of capturing not just the chronology of Bobby’s life, but also the sense of him as a person.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Captures RFK’s rise and fall with straightforward prose bolstered by impressive research.”—USA Today “[Tye] has a keen gift for narrative storytelling and an ability to depict his subject with almost novelistic emotional detail.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Nuanced and thorough . . . [RFK’s] vision echoes through the decades.”—The Economist

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

Random House Audio |

The idea for this book came to Larry Tye as he traveled overseas as a reporter for the Boston Globe. In each city he visited he was intrigued by a reawakening of practice and spirit of the long repressed Jewish community. And the more communities he saw close-up, the clearer it became to him that the Jewish world was being reshaped and revitalized in ways that were not reflected in what he was reading about the disappearing diaspora and the vanishing Jews of America. The result is Home Lands, an narrative that tells the story of the new Jewish diaspora. Tye picked seven Jewish communities from Boston to Buenos Aires and Dusseldorf to Dnepropetrovsk deep in the Ukraine, and in each he zeroes in on a single family or congregation whose tale reflects the wider community's history and current situation. He met each community's leaders, talked with their scores of young people and old, and went with them to High Holiday services and Sabbath celebrations. The first impression that emerges from his travels is each city's uniqueness. Far more striking than the differences, however, is the unity. Jews all over the world still have enough customs and rituals in common for outsiders to see them as part of the same people, and for them to define themselves that way. It is that new comfort level, that sense of finally feel comfortable in the lands where they are living, that is at the heart of this engrossing book. Readers' eyes will be opened to how Germany, just a generation after the genocide, has the world's fastest-growing Jewish population; how the Jews of Buenos Aires have carved a place for themselves in a land that also gave refuge to Nazi henchmen like Adolph Eichman, and how Ireland is home to a tight-knit Jewish community that, remarkably, has produced Jewish Lord Mayors in Belfast, Cork and, twice from the same family, in Dublin. In Boston, Tye tells the story of his own family, whose roots run deep in the city's Jewish community. Home Lands is a book that is deeply personal even as it sheds light on the larger Jewish experience.

Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora

Middle East

Henry Holt and Co.

In his travels overseas as a reporter for The Boston Globe, Larry Tye found a Jewish world that was being revitalized in ways that were not reflected in what he was reading about the disappearing diaspora and the vanishing Jews of America. His discoveries led him to write Home Lands, a compelling narrative that tells the story of a renewed Jewish diaspora. Tye picked seven Jewish communities around the world, and in each he zeroes in on a single family or congregation whose tale reflects the wider community's history and current situation. The first impression that emerges from his travels are the cities' differences. Far more striking, however, is what they share-Jews everywhere still have enough customs and rituals in common for outsiders to see them as part of the same people.

World

Picador

The Father of Spin is the first full-length biography of the legendary Edward L. Bernays, who, beginning in the 1920s, was one of the first and most successful practioners of the art of public relations. In this engrossing biography, Larry Tye uses Bernays's life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical-and sometimes insidious-role in American life. 
Drawing on interviews with primary sources and voluminous private papers, Tye presents a fascinating and revealing portrait of the man who, more than any other, defined and personified public relations, a profession that today helps shape our political discourse and define our commercial choices.

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations

Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

An engaging social history that reveals the critical role Pullman porters played in the struggle for African American civil rights When George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars, the former slaves suffering under Jim Crow laws found his offer of a steady job and worldly experience irresistible. They quickly signed up to serve as maid, waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African American men in the country by the 1920s. In the world of the Pullman sleeping car, where whites and blacks lived in close proximity, porters developed a unique culture marked by idiosyncratic language, railroad lore, and shared experience. They called difficult passengers "Mister Charlie"; exchanged stories about Daddy Jim, the legendary first Pullman porter; and learned to distinguish generous tippers such as Humphrey Bogart from skinflints like Babe Ruth. At the same time, they played important social, political, and economic roles, carrying jazz and blues to outlying areas, forming America's first black trade union, and acting as forerunners of the modern black middle class by virtue of their social position and income. Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the complicated world of the Pullman porter, and provides a lively and enlightening look at this important social phenomenon.

Business & Money

Economics

"A valuable window into a long-underreported dimension of African American history."―Newsday
When George Pullman began recruiting Southern blacks as porters in his luxurious new sleeping cars, the former slaves suffering under Jim Crow laws found his offer of a steady job and worldly experience irresistible. They quickly signed up to serve as maid, waiter, concierge, nanny, and occasionally doctor and undertaker to cars full of white passengers, making the Pullman Company the largest employer of African Americans in the country by the 1920s.
Drawing on extensive interviews with dozens of porters and their descendants, Larry Tye reconstructs the complicated world of the Pullman porter and the vital cultural, political, and economic roles they played as forerunners of the modern black middle class. Rising from the Rails provides a lively and enlightening look at this important social phenomenon.
• Named a Recommended Book by The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Seattle Times

Holt Paperbacks

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tye, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tye, Larry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tye, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Superman (Lib)(CD)

The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora

Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations

Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class

Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class