The Great Oom

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joe sz
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The Great Oom

Unread post by joe sz »

The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love (2010) is a great read filled with fascinating details about the crazy quilt of seekers and gurus during the first half of the 20th Century. This is a bio about Pierre Bernard (born Perry Baker in Iowa in 1876) later dubbed as the Great or Omnipotent Oom by the yellow press. A host of celebrities gathered around Bernard and went to him for all sorts of advice. One boxer who fought Joe Louis trained and learned yoga under Bernard. Leopold Stokowski, the great composer/orchestra director featured in Disney's Fantasia was a long-time devotee. Fans included Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo who learned yoga al la the Great Oom. Yogananda who later started SRF lectured there when coming to America. Hazrat Inayat Khan started out at Oom's center before he initiated his Sufi Movement, later led by son Pir Vilayat Khan. Pete Seeger as a kid was raised in the Oom's cult in Nyack NY for a time and would visit there as an adult. Ida Rolf called Bernard's yoga teaching "the cornerstone of her teachings." Bernard had a baseball field, a circus complete with many elephants and a major, expensive country club at his yoga center in Nyack.

Pierre Bernard lived till he was 79 but his glory was faded by then in the 1950s, yet his second generation of hatha and tantrik "yoga" teachers influenced the Beats, Hippies and any number of American movements.

This book is a fine study by a former editor of Rolling Stone and now adjunct professor of jounalism at Columbia
joe sz
Posts: 1010
Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2008 2:43 am
Location: Birdsboro, PA
Contact:

Re: The Great Oom

Unread post by joe sz »

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Oom-Improba ... 886&sr=8-1
From Publishers Weekly
Eastern spirituality and Western commercialism fuse in this flamboyant tale of an iconic American guru. Journalist Love tells the story of Pierre Bernard, a yoga adept from Iowa who made a splash at the turn of the 20th century by enduring bloody piercings and lacerations under trance. His Tantrik Order of disciples in San Francisco and New York soon gained notoriety; after police raided his schools, Bernard was accused of seducing girls and conducting sacred orgies. Delighted tabloids dubbed him The Great Oom. Bernard rehabilitated himself in the 1920s with the Clarkstown Country Club, a yoga-themed resort and rehab center for the rich on the Hudson, financed by a parade of heiresses who fell under his sway. Love makes his hero a quintessentially American character who yoked his mystic bent to a brash entrepreneurialism; with the riches he made from his yoga initiatives, he started a chemical company, an airport, a semipro baseball team with a midget second baseman, and a trained elephant act. Love credits Bernard with changing public perception of yoga from dissolute exoticism to healthful normalcy, but this colorful, frenetic tale reminds us that money is America's true religion. Photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Few Americans practicing hatha yoga today will have heard of Pierre Bernard, the “first American yogi.” Journalist Love only found out about the notorious mystic and chimerical genius nicknamed the Great Oom when he and his wife moved to Nyack, New York, and discovered that they were living on what was once part of Bernard’s lavish country club-cum-ashram. Love diligently researched the forgotten tale of how yoga, once demonized as obscene and dangerous in the States, became a popular path to health, while retrieving the rollicking story of a true American original. Born in Iowa in 1876, the future guru found the unlikeliest of mentors, a yoga master from Calcutta. Once he became adept at yoga’s most dramatic practices, Bernard, a brilliant, charismatic, and fearless entrepreneur, weathered scandals, legal battles, and jail to create a Jazz Age empire that attracted the rich and famous. Yoga was the magnet, but Bernard’s upscale bohemian commune also offered semipro baseball, theatrical productions, circuses, and sexual freedom. Bernard concurrently managed banks, became an “aviation czar,” broke hearts, and made enemies. Love writes with all the zest, wit, and empathy his protean subject deserves as he tells this dazzling tale of a self-made man of holistic convictions and archetypal flaws. --Donna Seaman
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