Books
DEMAGOGUE - Released on July 7, 2020
Catalogue
Demagogue
Demagogue is two books in one – a biography of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in U.S. history, and a broader look at America’s long-standing love affair with bullies.
Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.
Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.
But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.
As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.
Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.
Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.
But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.
As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.
Bobby Kennedy
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon traces RFK's transformation from cold warrior to progressive knight. Seen by many as the most authentic political leader in modern American history, Bobby was a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and an uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust. But his crusade for president in 1968 was tragically cut short, leaving us to wonder what might have been.
Superman
Superman is the first full-fledged biography not just of the Man of Steel, but of the visionary writers and artists, publishers and performers, who kept aloft the red-and-blue-clad icon through eight decades and counting. Larry Tye shows us how Superman, like few other mythical characters before or since, has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his changing times and our highest aspirations.
Satchel
Leroy “Satchel” Paige was the most sensational pitcher ever to throw a baseball. During his years in the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so scorching that catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks. His career stats -- 2,000 wins, 250 shutouts, three victories on the same day -- are so eye-popping they seem like misprints. But bigotry kept big league teams from signing him until he was forty-two, at which point he helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Over a career that spanned four decades, Satchel pitched more baseballs, for more fans, in more ballparks, for more teams, than any player in history.
Shock
Shock is two stories in one. The first half is Kitty Dukakis’ 20-year battle against depression, along with alcohol and drug addictions. She tried every medication and treatment available, but it was not until she got electroconvulsive therapy that she could reclaim her life. In the other half of the book, Larry Tye looks at the science behind ECT and its dramatic yet subterranean comeback. Shock shows how ECT offers a better chance of overcoming depression and other disabling mental illnesses than the best antidepressant or therapy, but it also talks about memory loss and other potential risks.
Rising From The Rails
Pullman porters held the worst job on the train and the best in the black community for the 100 years they worked on George Pullman’s sleeping cars. They launched the first successful black trade union and helped fuel the civil rights movement. Yet as Rising from the Rails shows, porters’ most lasting legacy was giving birth to children and grandchildren who run America’s cities and states, sit on corporate and editorial boards, number among this country’s leading professors, doctors and lawyers, and form the core of today’s African-American middle class.
Homelands
Home Lands tells the stories of seven far-flung Jewish communities from Boston to Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf to Dnepropetrovsk deep in the Ukraine. Together they make up a renewed diaspora. It is a world of reawakening, where children are leading parents and grandparents back to their culture and faith. This new Jewish diaspora, Home Lands makes clear, is no mere curiosity of history, but rather the reality of today and tomorrow.
Father Of Spin
Edward L. Bernays sold American women on smoking cigarettes. He made Ivory the all-American soap and helped make Calvin Coolidge president. This nephew of Sigmund Freud borrowed his uncle’s ideas on why people behave as they do, then used those ideas to make people behave the ways his clients wanted. In the process, Father of Spin tells us, Bernays helped shape America’s commercial choices and define our political discourse.
DEMAGOGUE
Demagogue is two books in one – a biography of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in U.S. history, and a broader look at America’s long-standing love affair with bullies.
Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.
Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.
But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.
As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.
Author Larry Tye got the first-ever access to McCarthy’s personal and professional papers, medical and military records, love letters, wartime diaries, and other files that had been under lock and key for half a century. Examining this fresh evidence of McCarthy’s official excesses, and of his surprising behind-the-scenes humanity, makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and their parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catch phrases like witch hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to provoke senators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, Tye reveals Senator McCarthy as neither the Genghis Kahn his enemies depicted, nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends.
Somewhere between that saint and sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and avenging of foes, and more sinister.
But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation’s veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy’s drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him – from Huey “The Kingfish” Long to Boston’s “Rascal King” mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan’s Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin – and McCarthy in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen’s simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.
As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we are desperate for one: every one of those autocrats – Curley and Wallace, Coughlin and McCarthy – fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.
BOBBY KENNEDY
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon traces RFK's transformation from cold warrior to progressive knight. Seen by many as the most authentic political leader in modern American history, Bobby was a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and an uncommon optimist in an age of political distrust. But his crusade for president in 1968 was tragically cut short, leaving us to wonder what might have been.
SUPERMAN
Superman is the first full-fledged biography not just of the Man of Steel, but of the visionary writers and artists, publishers and performers, who kept aloft the red-and-blue-clad icon through eight decades and counting. Larry Tye shows us how Superman, like few other mythical characters before or since, has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his changing times and our highest aspirations.
SATCHEL
Leroy “Satchel” Paige was the most sensational pitcher ever to throw a baseball. During his years in the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so scorching that catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks. His career stats -- 2,000 wins, 250 shutouts, three victories on the same day -- are so eye-popping they seem like misprints. But bigotry kept big league teams from signing him until he was forty-two, at which point he helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Over a career that spanned four decades, Satchel pitched more baseballs, for more fans, in more ballparks, for more teams, than any player in history.
SHOCK
Shock is two stories in one. The first half is Kitty Dukakis’ 20-year battle against depression, along with alcohol and drug addictions. She tried every medication and treatment available, but it was not until she got electroconvulsive therapy that she could reclaim her life. In the other half of the book, Larry Tye looks at the science behind ECT and its dramatic yet subterranean comeback. Shock shows how ECT offers a better chance of overcoming depression and other disabling mental illnesses than the best antidepressant or therapy, but it also talks about memory loss and other potential risks.
RISING FROM THE RAILS
Pullman porters held the worst job on the train and the best in the black community for the 100 years they worked on George Pullman’s sleeping cars. They launched the first successful black trade union and helped fuel the civil rights movement. Yet as Rising from the Rails shows, porters’ most lasting legacy was giving birth to children and grandchildren who run America’s cities and states, sit on corporate and editorial boards, number among this country’s leading professors, doctors and lawyers, and form the core of today’s African-American middle class.
HOMELANDS
Home Lands tells the stories of seven far-flung Jewish communities from Boston to Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf to Dnepropetrovsk deep in the Ukraine. Together they make up a renewed diaspora. It is a world of reawakening, where children are leading parents and grandparents back to their culture and faith. This new Jewish diaspora, Home Lands makes clear, is no mere curiosity of history, but rather the reality of today and tomorrow.
THE FATHER OF SPIN
Edward L. Bernays sold American women on smoking cigarettes. He made Ivory the all-American soap and helped make Calvin Coolidge president. This nephew of Sigmund Freud borrowed his uncle’s ideas on why people behave as they do, then used those ideas to make people behave the ways his clients wanted. In the process, Father of Spin tells us, Bernays helped shape America’s commercial choices and define our political discourse.