Search results for ""author tom bethell""

Eric Hoffer was unknown in the American literary and philosophical scene in 1951 when he published his first book, The True Believer. Almost overnight, the San Francisco dockworker became a public figure, helped by a 1956 profile in Look magazine that identified Hoffer as "Ike's Favorite Author"—elevating this blue-collar working man to the level of President Eisenhower's bedside table. Recognized as a highly original thinker, he became known as the "Longshoreman Philosopher." In this book, Tom Bethell paints a new, insightful portrait of this American original. He draws much of his material from Hoffer's personal papers—acquired by the Hoover Institution in 2000—and interviews with those who knew the man, as well as his own interviews with Hoffer, conducted shortly before his death. The result is a detailed portrait of an enigmatic philosopher who was interested in probing the depths of human behavior and discovering the motivations behind the twentieth century's wars and revolutions.Hoffer's life divides into two roughly equal parts. The first part is from birth to his move to San Francisco after Pearl Harbor. The second is his life in San Francisco. Before Pearl Harbor, Hoffer's life is documented only by what he said or wrote. His best friend, Lili Osborne, summarized the difficulty: "all we know about Eric's early life is what he told us." There is a wealth of information on his later life, however, and Bethell reveals it in great detail. He tells of Hoffer's emergence as a public figure in the 1950s, a period he referred to as a "paradise of lost innocence." He details the whirlwind that was Hoffer's life in the 1960s—a decade notorious for attitudes that Hoffer grew to detest—when he became a well-known figure on the national stage. And he provides an insightful look at Hoffer's gradual withdrawal from public life until his death in 1983.

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George Lewis, one of the great traditional jazz clarinetists, was born in 1900 at about the same time that jazz itself first appeared in New Orleans. And by the time he died, on the last day of 1968, New Orleans jazz had pretty much run its course, too. By then a jazz museum stood on Bourbon Street, and a cultural center was under construction where Globe Hall had Stood. Lewis's life thus paralleled that of New Orleans jazz, and in his later years hew as the best known standard bearer of his city's music. He came to the attention of the jazz world at the time of the so-called "New Orleans Revival" of the 1940's, when veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson was recorded by a number of jazz enthusiasts, notably William Russell. In this new biography, Tom Bethell challenges a favorite myth of the history of jazz: that the music became moribund in New Orleans after the legal red light district, Storyville, was closed in 1917, resulting in most jazz musicians going "up the river." In fact, Bethell shows, many more jazzmen stayed in the city than left, and the musical style continued to develop and grow. Thus the jazz fans who arrived in the city in the early 1940's did not encounter a "revival" of an old style so much as an ongoing tradition, with clarinetists like Lewis having been influenced by Benny Goodman and the Swing Era in addition to Lorenzo Tio and the Creole School. After Bunk Johnson's death in 1949, at a time when many other social changes were beginning to be felt in the city, the New Orleans jazz tradition began to go into a decline. It became increasingly rigid and repetitive, and was often designed to please what one observer called "Dixieland fans yelling for their favorite members." The book is based on lengthy research in New Orleans, including interviews with George Lewis shortly before his death, and unpublished material from the diaries kept by William Russell on his visits to New Orleans between 1942 and 1949. It also includes a statement by Lewis on jazz and the best way to play it and a complete Lewis discography. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

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