CANR
WORK TITLE: THE JAZZMEN
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.larrytye.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 330
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1954, in Haverhill, MA; married; wife’s name Lisa; children: two.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Brown University, 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, writer. Anniston Star, Anniston, AL, reporter, 1980-82; Louisville Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, reporter, 1982-86; Boston Globe, Boston, MA, reporter, 1986-2001; Health Coverage Fellowship, Boston, MA, director, 2001—. Also worked two years for Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis; worked two years for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Has taught at Boston University, Northeastern University, and Tufts University.
AWARDS:Nieman Fellow, Harvard University, 1993-94; Edward J. Meeman environmental prize; Livingston Award for Young Journalists; National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award; has also received awards from the Associated Press, Associated Press Sports Editors, Sigma Delta Chi, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, and National Alliance for the Mentally Ill; Casey Award, 2009, Seymour Award, 2010, and Times Notable Book Citation, all for Satchel.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]A journalist and accomplished author, Larry Tye has written individual and collective biographies that speak to the eras and cultural impacts of his diverse subjects, which have ranged from Pullman porters and politicians to athletes and jazz musicians. A reporter for the Boston Globe for a decade and a half, he focused on the fields of medicine and the environment. His book’s subjects have included Satchel Paige, Robert F. Kennedy, and Duke Ellington, as well as the fictional Superman.[suspend new]
The Father of Spin
Tye’s debut biography, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, began while he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a student of Edward L. Bernays’s daughter, the novelist Anne Bernays. “This guy seemed like a perfect character, and I decided at the end of that year that I was going to go back and try to write a book about him,” Tye told C-Span interviewer Brian Lamb.
Tye researched through more than 800 boxes of papers Bernays left to the U.S. Library of Congress to create his biography of the “father of public relations,” a man remembered for his campaigns to destigmatize female cigarette smoking for the American public. Bernays lived to be 103 years old, and he left behind a legacy that included advising United States Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover on their public images. Many of Bernays’s theories derived from the theories of his uncle, the noted progenitor of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. Writing in the New York Times, Ron Chernow stated: “The Freud-Bernays relationship, which should have formed the intellectual heart of Tye’s book, is unfortunately handled in a superficial manner.” Chernow, however, praised the biography when he wrote in the same review: “One merit of Tye’s book is the tough, unsparing way it debunks Bernays’s pretensions to superior morality.” A critic for Publishers Weekly faulted Tye for “too blithely [crediting] Bernays for shaping events and product success. … But Tye succeeds in piercing the rapidly spinning mythology that perpetually surrounded the man.”
Home Lands
In 2001, Tye published Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora, a look at the resilience of the Jewish community. Rather than being necessarily tied to Israel, Tye writes that Jews have now grounded themselves in the communities and cultures of the homes they have created throughout the world.
“Tye tells this intriguing story through sketches of people and of life in seven cities,” including Dublin, Buenos Aires, and Atlanta, noted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. According to Booklist contributor George Cohen, Tye concludes that “the diaspora is as critical to the survival of Israel as Israel is to the survival of the Jewish people.”
Rising from the Rails
In Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, Tye offers “a reasoned assessment of the Pullman porters’ role in black America,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor. After the end of the U.S. Civil War, industrialist Phillip Pullman hired freed slaves to handle the needs of white passengers aboard his sleeper service railroad cars; the Pullman Company eventually became the largest employer of black men in the nation. Among the men who served as porters were poet Claude McKay, union activist A. Philip Randolph, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Although the work was grueling, requiring the men to work long hours and perform often degrading tasks in return for little pay, “the upside was employment, travel, and middle-class values and opportunities,” noted Booklist critic Vernon Ford. As Tye remarked to Tavis Smiley in an interview for National Public Radio: “The Pullman porters picked up lots of different lessons when they were on the road with these wealthy, white passengers. It was everything from the mundane and practical lesson of getting tips on what stocks to invest in, to the much more important lesson of watching how white America worked.” In Rising from the Rails, noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Tye shows what whites never saw—the grinding, often humiliating, realities of the job and the rippling effect of steady employment in the upward mobility of the porters’ children and grandchildren.”
Satchel
Tye’s Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend is a biography about pitching legend Satchel Paige. The book focuses not only on the athletic prowess of Paige but also the historical context of his life. Coming up in the Negro Leagues, Paige’s life was more than a mere athletic competition. It was a cultural competition, one he eventually won in 1971 with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
An Internet Bookwatch contributor called Satchel “a winning survey,” while a Publishers Weekly contributor commented that it is the “definitive biography of a black showman-athlete.” Randall Schroeder, writing for Library Journal said that Tye “masterfully weaves primary and oral sources together to create a credible biography of a talkative yet elusive subject.”
Superman
Tye turned his biographer’s eye to a fictional character in his next outing, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. He relates the circumstances of the beloved character’s creation in 1938 and his many storylines, platforms, and reboots in the years since. Superman, Tye relates, has taken on everything from fascism to racism to the finance industry, and has appeared in radio shows, movies, and television shows in addition to his original 2-D platform, the comic. Indeed, his presence on television has been a near constant since the 1950s.
James Parker, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Superman an “exhaustive and engaging book. … For me the story lessens in excitement the closer it gets to the present: the predictably gritty reboots of the comic book, the megabucks ’70s and ’80s movies,” wrote Parker. “It’s in the middle of Tye’s book, in the thick of it, that you find the luscious old-school moments.” Maclean’s contributor Jaime J. Weinman felt that “Tye’s determination to describe every possible Superman comic and adaptation can produce a sense of fatigue.” Admitting that “occasionally, [Tye] offers details only true devotees will care about or be able to follow,” a Kirkus Reviews critic nonetheless deemed the book “fun, enlightening pop-culture history.” “Tye is an excellent storyteller,” wrote Elizabeth Winter in Library Journal. Winter found the book to be “a rich history full of lively heroes and villains—much like a comic book.”
Bobby Kennedy
In an interview with Daniel Ford for the Writer’s Bone website, Tye explained why he wrote his 2016 book, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. He stated: “I grew up in Massachusetts, with Kennedys everywhere, including going to high school with one of Bobby’s sons. I grew up with RFK as a hero. And I saw my mentors in journalism—the hardest-headed reporters of their generation—fall in love with Bobby, the first and only time they let themselves do that with a politician. I wanted to know more about this enigmatic political figure.” In the book, Tye discusses Kennedy’s childhood and his relationships with his parents and siblings. He goes on to track Kennedy’s evolution from an acolyte of Joseph McCarthy to a leader of the progressive movement. Tye also comments on Kennedy’s political alliances, his platform as a presidential candidate, and his untimely death.
Reviewing the volume in America, David O’Brien commented: “Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy might find a place in American saint studies, not as hagiography, though there is some of that, but as one of those critical but loving accounts given by truth-tellers when asked about sainthood for people like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.” “Tye … expertly traces the arc of his subject’s metamorphosis,” asserted Jennifer Bastien in the New Yorker. An Economist contributor remarked: “Mr Tye’s account is nuanced and thorough, and he manages the rare feat of interviewing Kennedy’s widow Ethel, now eighty-eight. Yet it is still hard for the reader to get truly inside the mind of this complex Kennedy.” Carol Haggas, writing in Booklist, described the book as “a complete portrait of a complex man whose contributions to history were essential and whose potential will remain forever unknowable.” A Publishers Weekly writer suggested: “Tye beautifully captures Kennedy’s contradictions.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted that the book features “richly researched prose that sometimes soars too close to the sun of admiration.” “Although other accounts have discussed Kennedy’s conservative origins, few authors have probed so deeply into just how committed and ruthless the young lawyer had been, willing to violate civil liberties in pursuit of his goals,” stated Julian E. Zelizer in the American Prospect. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Steve Donoghue suggested: “ Bobby Kennedy … is an engaging and mostly comprehensive life of the most enigmatic Kennedy, and it makes effective use of the resources the family opened to its author. And if it lacks a certain element of narrative grandeur, well, readers will always have the court histories for that.” New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani opined: “In these pages, Mr. Tye conscientiously strips away the accretions of myth that have come to surround Robert F. Kennedy, while at the same time creating a sympathetic portrait of this complex, searching man.” David Nasaw, in a review for the New York Times Online, remarked: “We are in Larry Tye’s debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who spoke these words and, for a brief moment, almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans.”
[resume new]
Demagogue
Tye turns to a senator viewed less favorably by history with his next biography, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy entered the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin in 1946 with a victory over a long-serving incumbent and quickly became viewed even by fellow Republicans as a posturing windbag. He infamously joined forces with lawyer Roy Cohn to launch a quest to unmask Communists who had infiltrated the government. He suspected that the armed services, State Department, and other federal agencies were host to thousands. Bullying his fellow senators into letting him hold secret hearings that led to blacklistings, ruined lives, and occasional suicides, McCarthy meanwhile battled alcoholism and was regularly treated with the likes of morphine and codeine. He was pugnacious with the press, nursed vendettas, and often disregarded facts. In closing, Tye draws pointed parallels between his titular demagogue and a modern-day president who has earned the same label, Donald Trump.
Paraphrased by a Kirkus Reviews writer is the demagogue’s mantra that none other than Cohn taught Trump: “If you say it often enough, loudly enough, and insistently enough, and frighten your listener while you do so, it becomes true.” The reviewer deemed Tye’s text a “timely” investigation of a “would-be savior whose name remains a byword for demagoguery.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed Demagogue a “sure-handed … searing and informative portrait of the man and his specific brand of self-aggrandizing demagoguery.” In Booklist, Mary Ann Gwinn appreciated the book’s evenhanded treatment and affirmed that, although many consider McCarthy a “done and dusted relic for the history books,” Tye “brings him back to ferocious life.”
The Jazzmen
Like Satchel, Tye’s next book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, was borne of a promise made to old-time Pullman porters he interviewed for Rising from the Rails. They wanted to see biographies of their favorite baseball player as well as their favorite passengers, the famous jazz musicians who made Pullman cars their home away from home while traveling in the South. As Tye relates, the three men who would be united by history began and led very different lives. Ellington was a grandson of slaves, Armstrong was partly raised by a family of Lithuanian Jews, and Basie dreamed of forging the world afresh. Based in Harlem’s Cotton Club, Chicago’s Sunset Cafe, and Kansas City’s Reno Club, respectively, the three men advanced the fight against prejudice in the Jim Crow era by impressing white audiences with their talents. Moreover, as religious men they fought conservative notions that freewheeling jazz represented the degradation of society, even as their personal lives were sometimes turbulent.
In a Publishers Weekly interview, Tye hailed his book’s subjects as “three of the most rollicking and fun maestros in the history of American music.” Appreciating the characterizations of Ellington as Shakespearean, Armstrong as Twainesque, and Basie as an Everyman, June Sawyers declared in Booklist that Tye “incisively portrays three seminal American artists.” A Kirkus Reviews writer enjoyed how Tye’s “vivid style brings readers front and center into the myriad of clubs” the men played. The reviewer praised The Jazzmen as a “thoroughly enjoyable musical journey” in which Tye shows how the three musicians “transcended jazz and even music itself to establish themselves in American culture forevermore.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, October 10, 2016, David O’Brien, review of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, p. 27.
American Prospect, summer, 2016, Julian E. Zelizer, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 103.
AudioFile, October-November, 2016, Susan C. Awe, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 45.
Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005, Shatema Threadcraft, review of Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, p. 56.
Booklist, July, 2001, George Cohen, review of Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora, p. 1976; June 1, 2004, Vernon Ford, review of Rising from the Rails, p. 1680; September 1, 2009, Sue-Ellen Beauregard, review of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, p. 118; June 1, 2016, Carol Haggas, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 27; April 1, 2020, Mary Ann Gwinn, review of Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, p. 6; March 15, 2024, June Sawyers, review of The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, p. 30.
Christian Science Monitor, July 5, 2016, Steve Donoghue, review of Bobby Kennedy.
Economist, October 17, 1998, review of The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, p. 1; July 9, 2016, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 71.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2004, review of Rising from the Rails, p. 435; May 15, 2012, review of Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero; May 15, 2016, review of Bobby Kennedy; March 1, 2020, review of Demagogue; March 15, 2024, review of The Jazzmen.
Library Journal, May 15, 2009, Randall Schroeder, review of Satchel, p. 78; June 15, 2012, Elizabeth Winter, review of Superman, p. 90; June 15, 2016, Karl Helicher, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 84; November 1, 2016, Pam Kingsbury, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 47.
Maclean’s, August 13, 2012, Jaime J. Weinman, review of Superman, p. 60.
Neiman Reports, fall, 2016, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 63.
New Yorker, August 22, 2016, Jennifer Bastien, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 77.
New York Times, August 16, 1998, Ron Chernow, “First among Flacks”; August 16, 2016, Michiko Kakutani, “A Pragmatist Converting to Idealism,” review of Bobby Kennedy, p. C1.
New York Times Book Review, July 8, 2012, James Parker, review of Superman, p. 1.
Publishers Weekly, August 3, 1998, review of The Father of Spin, p. 65; May 3, 2004, review of Rising from the Rails, p. 178; April 20, 2009, review of Satchel, p. 39; April 16, 2012, review of Superman, p. 55; May 16, 2016, review of Bobby Kennedy, p. 47; March 9, 2020, review of Demagogue, p. 55.
ONLINE
Cape Cod Times, https://www.capecodtimes.com/ (April 5, 2020), Larry Tye, “Essay: Author Larry Tye Spends His Time in Self-Quarantine with a Trio of Late, Great Jazzmen.”
C-Span website, http://www.c-span.org/ (September 20, 1998), Brian Lamb, author interview.
Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (August 10, 2016), Bill Daley, review of Bobby Kennedy.
Internet Bookwatch, http://www.midwestbookreview.com/ibw/ (August 1, 2009), review of Satchel.
Larry Tye website, https://larrytye.com (April 22, 2024).
National Public Radio (NPR) website, http://www.npr.org/ (July 14, 2004), “The Tavis Smiley Show: Author Larry Tye and Former Pullman Porter Babe Smock Talk about the Life of a Pullman Porter”; (July 5, 2016), Terry Gross, “From ‘Runt of the Litter’ to ‘Liberal Icon’: The Story of Robert Kennedy.”
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 5, 2016), David Nasaw, review of Bobby Kennedy.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 9, 2024), Henry Carrigan, “Ambassadors of Jazz: PW Talks with Larry Tye.”
San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/ (July 7, 2016), Elaine Elinson, review of Bobby Kennedy.
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (July 22, 2016), Joe Scarborough, review of Bobby Kennedy.
Writer’s Bone, http://www.writersbone.com/ (July 25, 2016), Daniel Ford, author interview.
Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book — a joint biography of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie — looks at how these three maestros wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution. It will be released by HarperCollins on May 7. 2024.
Tye’s first book, The Father of Spin, is a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. Home Lands looks at the Jewish renewal underway from Boston to Buenos Aires. Rising from the Rails explores how the black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement and gave birth to today’s African-American middle class. Shock, a collaboration with Kitty Dukakis, is a journalist’s first-person account of ECT, psychiatry’s most controversial treatment, and a portrait of how that therapy helped one woman overcome debilitating depression. Satchel is the biography of two American icons – Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Superman tells the nearly-real life story of the most enduring American hero of the last century.
Tye’s most recent books look at how two U.S. senators helped shape their times. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon explores RFK’s extraordinary transformation from cold warrior to fiery leftist. Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy probes America’s prolonged love affair with bullies.
In addition to his writing, Tye runs the Health Coverage Fellowship, which helps the media do a better job reporting on critical issues like pandemics, mental health, and high-tech medicine. Launched in 2001 and supported by a series of foundations, the fellowship trains a dozen medical journalists a year from newspapers, radio stations, TV, and online outlets nationwide.
From 1986 to 2001, Tye was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe’s environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sports writer. Before that, he was the environmental reporter at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, and covered government and business at The Anniston Star in Alabama.
Tye, who graduated from Brown University, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts.
Tye is currently writing, for HarperCollins, a book entitled, The Forger of Paris: Adolfo Kaminsky and Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust.
Ambassadors of Jazz: PW Talks with Larry Tye
By Henry Carrigan | Feb 09, 2024
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In The Jazzmen (Mariner, May), Tye traces how three legendary musicians shaped and were shaped by American culture.
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None of your previous books are about music or musicians. What prompted this one?
I wrote a book almost 20 years ago about the Pullman porters, who formed the first Black trade union. When I was talking to the porters, they made me promise to write two books: one about their favorite sports figure, Satchel Paige, and the other about their favorite passengers, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. When these musicians traveled below the Mason-Dixon line, they’d hire Pullman cars to have a safe place to eat and sleep after their performances. After they returned to the Pullman cars, they would often hold late-night private jam sessions for the porters.
What do their stories reveal about the history of jazz ?
They were all born into the nascent jazz world at about the same time, and each encountered many of the difficulties faced by Black jazz musicians. Their stories also trace the development of different styles of jazz in the cities where they got their start: Kansas City [Basie], New York City [Ellington], and New Orleans and Chicago [Armstrong]. Each took a different approach to jazz: Armstrong could hit his high C’s; Ellington could tell stories about Black America in his symphonic pieces; Basie couldn’t resist tapping his feet, and he got his audiences’ tapping theirs as well.
In what ways did their music influence their times and other music?
They laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about how jazz opened up America; it said something to white America about Black artistry and about equal rights. In the same way that gospel music laid the groundwork for jazz, this music laid the groundwork for rock, pop, and soul music. If jazz was an all-American music form, these three were its ambassadors.
What surprised you?
There’s danger in writing about people you think of as heroes or villains. These guys all started out as my heroes, but I discovered they were flesh and blood. I found out things about each of them that suggested they were not entirely unblemished—such as their constant philandering and their failures to create harmonious family lives—but that made them more human.
What lessons do you hope readers take from the book?
These are three of the most rollicking and fun maestros in the history of American music. I hope readers will learn what they meant to American culture and the wider world. Good art really does change our thinking—in this case about what Black men were capable of and that they deserved to be treated as equal.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/12/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Ambassadors of Jazz
Essay: Author Larry Tye spends his time in self-quarantihe with a trio of late, great jazzmen
Larry Tye
SKIP
Robert Kennedy biographer Larry Tye, now social distancing and working on a new book about jazz greats. photographed at his Cotuit home in 2018.. His essay looks at getting by day-to-day and finding parallels between struggles of the musicians and those everyone faces today..
Everyone who writes for a paycheck, like I do, is coping with the feverish anxieties of the corona scare as best they can. For me, the answer is a prolonged riff or two suspended in midair. Throbbing solos unfurled on a jam-packed stage. And a handful of seniors eager to share — via a socially-distant telephone — flashbacks of hot nights in Harlem dance halls nearly a century ago.
That’s because I am working on a book to be called, “The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America.” Since I am grounded like the rest of the world, I spend my days in my Cotuit study tuning in to classics like “Mood Indigo” and “Mack the Knife,” parsing the snazzy soundtracks of films like “Anatomy of a Murder,” and immersing myself in Ellington’s memoir “Music Is My Mistress,” Armstrong’s “Swing that Music” and Basie’s “Good Morning Blues.”
The only better escape than reading a book is writing one.
I’m generally up when the only light is the moon’s, and I start my roam through the past by dialing a time zone where I won’t wake the aging sidemen and women, critics, and others who knew my trio. Last Monday, 82-year-old musicologist Dick Spottswood explained how Louie Armstrong sprouted from the same “intrinsically American” roots as the bluegrass music Spottswood knows better than anyone. On Tuesday, 79-year-old Hank O’Neal recounted how his record publishing partner discovered a callow Count Basie, sent him on the road for “seasoning,” then brought him back to New York where he was a swinging sensation. The next day Louis Tavecchio, a spry 74, talked from Amsterdam about how as a teenager he was so inspired by Ellington that he went on to produce 100 hour-long broadcasts on Duke for the Dutch Concert Channel.
Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie “always have been great artists,” but Jim Crow America was slow to acknowledge that, Tavecchio remembers. “The appreciation of their great artistry,” the retired psychologist proudly adds, “began in Europe.” His reference makes me think of the chaotic state of much of Europe today, where the virus is raging and most nations have been slow to react. In the Netherlands, the government at first insisted that shutdowns are “not necessary, it’s not good for the economy etcetera, etcetera,” says Tavecchio, but “yesterday, the Prime Minister said we have to close the schools, the childcare institutions, daycare institutions. Everything is closed.”
My interviewees are of an age that puts them at special peril from Covid-19, so they’re all mainly staying home and, like me, they relish any conversation that can transport them back to the rip-roaring jazz of the 1930s, ‘40s, and 50s. The same, I hope, is true of today’s maestros, from Wynton Marsalis to Jon Batiste and Pat Metheny, who have agreed to talk but until now have had trouble finding time.
None of us, of course, can escape all the dislocations brought on by this nerve-rattling pathogen. In addition to writing, I run a fellowship program for health journalists that brings to Boston a dozen of the best for nine days and nights of training on issues ranging from mental health to pandemics. This year’s program was supposed to begin last week, but we recently told our reporters and editors, along with 100 speakers, that we are postponing to September. I also have a book —“Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” — due out in July, and the multi-city tour my publisher and I planned is now on a virus hold.
That’s why, even as I spend part of my day rebooking for the fall fellowship and trying to transform live McCarthy talks into virtual ones, during the rest I eagerly look back. There, the history is settled, there is no mounting test count, and all I need for my work is a home library, a computer with a headset, and an old-fashioned telephone. At midday, I walk from Oregon Beach to Loop with my wife and dog, far enough from others that they can’t hear me humming Duke’s “Soul Soothing Beach” and the not-to-be-forgotten take on “Summertime” that Satchmo recorded with Ella Fitzgerald. I know that in neighborhoods around the world people are now assembling in the evening to sing, and I wonder if on Cape Cod we should be crooning Count Basie’s “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”
What I’m finding in my jazz reveries is that my three subjects are even more magnetic than I thought. Edward Kennedy Ellington was a man whose story is as layered as his name suggests and whose music defied category. Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a black bayou so tough it was called The Battlefield, and after his father disappeared he was mentored by Lithuanian Jews named Karnofsky. William James Basie, the son of a coachman and laundress, dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town and finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller. While none of my troika faced a raging plague like we are, each confronted a racism virulent enough to make them feel violated in a manner that was different but not altogether. And each was defiant.
As their irresistible tunes continue to keep our feet tapping under the table, the Duke, Satchmo, and the Count resonate in the way they quietly ignited revolutions in how music is made and how human rights are won. Their achievements cannot help but lift hearts on even the worst of days. Days, even, like these.
Larry Tye is a Cotuit author whose last book was "Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon," and next is "Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy."
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Larry Tye in 2009.
Larry Tye is an American non-fiction author and journalist known for his biographies of notable Americans including Edward Bernays (1999) Satchel Paige (2009), Robert F. Kennedy (2016) and Joseph McCarthy (2020).
From 1986 to 2001, Tye was a reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe's environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter and sports writer. Before that, he was the environmental reporter at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and covered government and business at The Anniston Star in Anniston, Alabama.
Tye was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993–1994[1] and has won a series of major newspaper awards, including the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Journalism.
Two of Tye's books, one on the Pullman porters and another on electroconvulsive therapy, have been adapted into documentary films.[2] Sony and Hulu are making his biography of Robert Kennedy into a limited TV series, with Chris Pine due to play Kennedy.[3]
Tye won a Goldsmith Research Prize from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and research grants from the Newberry Library, Gilder Lehrman Institute, and the Eisenhower and Truman libraries. His books have won awards, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness's highest honor for one on mental illness co-authored with Kitty Dukakis. Tye's biography of Satchel Paige was named a New York Times Notable Book, and won two prizes—the Casey Award and Seymour Medal—as best baseball book of 2009.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that Tye’s latest book, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, was “the fullest account yet” of McCarthy and “the rigor of his research ensures he goes far beyond the caricature to give us a portrait of nuance and depth.”[4] NPR reported that the book also, “draws a parallel between McCarthy's tactics and President Trump's divisive rhetoric.”[5]
Additionally, Tye is director of the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship, which each year trains 10 American medical journalists on better covering issues in this field.
Education and teaching
Tye, who graduated from Brown University, taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern University and Tufts University.[citation needed]
Works
The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown Publishing Group (1998). ISBN 978-0517704356.
Homelands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora. New York: Henry Holt & Company (2001). ISBN 978-0805065909.
Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. New York: Henry Holt & Company (2004). ISBN 978-0805070750.
Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy, co-written by Kitty Dukakis. Avery Publishing (2007). ISBN 978-1583332832.
Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. New York: Random House (2009). ISBN 978-1400066513.[6]
Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero. New York: Random House (2012). ISBN 978-1400068661.
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. New York: Random House (2016). ISBN 978-0812993349.[7]
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Houghton Mifflin (2020). ISBN 978-1328959720.
Honors and awards
2009 Casey Award for Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend[8]
2010 Seymour Medal for Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend[9]
Tye, Larry DEMAGOGUE Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (NonFiction Nonfiction) $36.00 5, 5 ISBN: 978-1-328-95972-0
A politically informed life of the crusading right-wing senator who saw a communist in every film studio, university, and military barracks.
Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) began his career in the Senate in 1946 after a surprise victory in Wisconsin over the long-serving Robert La Follette Jr. As Boston-based journalist Tye, the author of biographies of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel Paige, writes, McCarthy ran a bruising campaign of “relentless messaging” as “a kick-’em-in-the-nuts type of candidate.” Decidedly out of his element in the staid confines of the Capitol, he quickly built a reputation, even among his fellow Republicans, as “a gasbag and a pretender.” An undisguised anti-Semite, he carved out a place for himself by teaming up with anti-communist (and Jewish) attorney Roy Cohn and launching a crusade against suspected communists in the government, including, he charged, untold thousands of agents in the State Department and other federal agencies and within the ranks of the armed services. That he did so while frequently hospitalized and treated with “morphine, codeine, Demerol, and other potent narcotics” to battle the alcoholism that would kill him was testimony to his scrappiness. Though notorious for bad judgment—including giving a pass to the Nazis who had murdered American prisoners of war at Malmedy, which, Tye writes, “was just a warm-up act”—McCarthy put the fear in his opponents and browbeat his fellow senators into giving him his lead until he finally took it a step too far in hearings against the U.S. Army. The author concludes his meaty narrative by linking the current occupant of the White House to McCarthy by means of Cohn, “the flesh-and-blood nexus between the senator and the president,” who taught Trump a cardinal lesson: If you say it often enough, loudly enough, and insistently enough, and frighten your listener while you do so, it becomes true—and, if only for a time, a guarantee of success for any tyrant.
A timely examination of a would-be savior whose name remains a byword for demagoguery.
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"Tye, Larry: DEMAGOGUE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A616094016/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5cf4d86. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
Larry Tye. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $36 (608p) ISBN 978-1-328-95972-0
Biographer Tye (Bobby Kennedy) delivers a sure-handed account of the rise and fall of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. Drawing from a previously unavailable archive of McCarthy's "unscripted writings and correspondence," Tye looks to correct misconceptions large and small, including what actually took place behind closed doors of the 1953-1954 Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and how McCarthy could be "incongruously generous to those he had just publicly upbraided." Analyzing the origins of McCarthyism, Tye describes McCarthy's "last-minute" decision in 1950 to substitute a talk on housing policy for a speech alleging communist infiltration of the U.S. state department, and President Truman's 1947 Loyalty Order, which "mandated checks on nearly 5 million federal employees and applicants" and identified 299 "subversive organizations," including the Jewish Culture Society. (Some historians, Tye notes, believe that 1950s anti-Communism should have been called "Trumanism.") The book's most provocative sections, including a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a roundup of "lurid" claims that noted homophobe McCarthy was gay, add color but lack definitive proof. Though Tye occasionally veers into minutiae (as with the recipe for McCarthy's venison meatballs), he maintains a brisk pace throughout. The result is a searing and informative portrait of the man and his specific brand of self-aggrandizing demagoguery. Agent: Jill Kneerim. Kneerim & Williams. (May)
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"Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 10, 9 Mar. 2020, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617968266/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5a670ae8. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. By Larry Tye. May 2020. 608p. illus. HMH, $36 (97813289597201.328.73.
For many contemporary readers, Joseph McCarthy is a done and dusted relic for the history books, but Tye (Bobby Kennedy, 2016) brings him back to ferocious life. Wisconsin's Republican U.S. senator, who dominated the early 1950s with his anti-communist crusade, occupied "a different moral universe," said one longtime observer. "He asked himself only two questions'. What do I want and how do I get it?" Fueled by Cold War fears, McCarthy's hunt for communist-influenced employees in the government, the arts, and the military, conducted during often-secret congressional hearings, ruined careers and claimed lives through shame, stress, and suicide. The Republican Party enabled his rampage until he took on a target "too big to bully," the U.S. Army. The firebrand senator's battles with the press, his political vendettas, his disdain for facts, and his dismissal of his campaign's human costs are documented in appalling detail, but Tye is an evenhanded reporter, tracking the truth of stories advanced by both McCarthy's devotees and detractors. Though readers may grow to loathe McCarthy, it's painful to watch his alcohol-soaked deterioration and death. This is a must-read biography for anyone fascinated by American history, and every reader will blanch at its events' resemblances to today's fraught political conflicts. --Mary Ann Gwinn
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Gwinn, Mary Ann. "Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2020, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A621474238/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76160839. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
Tye, Larry THE JAZZMEN Mariner Books (NonFiction None) $32.50 5, 7 ISBN: 9780358380436
An examination of the lives of three kings of jazz and their impact on American society.
Tye, the bestselling author of biographies of Satchel Paige, Joseph McCarthy, and others, embarks on his first voyage into music history. In a single volume, he has essentially produced fairly substantial biographies of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, contemporaries who became three of the most decorated and celebrated musicians in American history. The author capably delineates their struggles with, and impact on, the often harrowing and sometimes violent complexities and shifting dynamics of American race relations during the first half of the 20th century. The most striking aspect of the book is the astonishing amount of research Tye conducted, the sometimes overwhelming yield of which clears up myths that the golden trio themselves often perpetuated regarding their upbringings, their turbulent personal lives, and the technical evolution of their music. The author takes a fascinating look at the religious backgrounds and beliefs of Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington, who were the most prominent frontmen of the music that fanatics and public figures long blamed and targeted for societal degradation. Tye also explores the friendly but fierce professional rivalry among the three. The author's vivid style brings readers front and center into the myriad of clubs and studios where Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington played, as well as the social vibe of the cities and towns where their music left an indelible mark. This thoroughly enjoyable musical journey is succinctly titled, yet the scope of Tye's research demonstrates why and how Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington transcended jazz and even music itself to establish themselves in American culture forevermore in words that a young Ellington employed to describe himself: "beyond category." For Ellington, "it wasn't a contradiction to be an artist as well as a showman."
A delightful read.
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"Tye, Larry: THE JAZZMEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185769/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f9193d55. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.
The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America. By Larry Tye. May 2024. 512p. Mariner, $32.50 (9780358380436); e-book (9780358380429). 781.65.
Although many books have been written about these iconic jazz artists, Tye (Demagogue, 2020) insists that "we don't know any of the three. Not really." Duke Ellington was the grandson of slaves. Louis Armstrong was raised by his grandmother, his great-grandmother, and a family of Lithuanian Jews. Count Basie dreamed of a world outside the one he was raised in and, with the help of pianist Fats Waller, was able to find it. Different in temperament, the three jazzmen made a collective impact, "elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom" even as they faced racial discrimination in Jim Crow America. None of these men were saints ("Not even close," Tye writes), but what matters is that "[t]hey gave us songs that were the ideal remedies for the blues of everyday life." In Tye's estimation, Ellington was "Shakespearean"; Armstrong, "the Mark Twain of song"; and Basie a "musical everyman." With descriptions of such key venues as Ellington's Cotton Club in Harlem, Basie's Reno Club in Kansas City, and Armstrong's Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Tye incisively portrays three seminal American artists.--June Sawyers
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Sawyers, June. "The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2024, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788124864/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4ddc3e8. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.