The man who revolutionized the presentation of products, people, politics, and news to the American public. 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` 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 195Os. 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, he also did for politicians, including Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
About the author:
From 1986 to 2001, Larry 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. He wrote series on how 30 years of socialism devastated Eastern Europe`s environment, the erosion of personal privacy in today`s high-tech society, why Pentecostalism is the world`s fastest-growing religion, and the mixed legacy of California`s experiment with market-driven medicine. Tye has won a series of national reporting awards, including the Edward J. Meeman environmental prize, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and the National Wildlife Federation`s Conservation Achievement Award.
