Earlier this spring Columbia Journalism professor Robert Love published his book The Great Oom, The Improbably Birth of Yoga in America (Viking Adult, $27.95). This biography chronicles Pierre Bernard's transformation from an Iowa-born nobody into a radical leader of mind-body consciousness--in the late 19th century. According to this NPR story, contemporary yogis have Bernard to thank for the existence of yoga in America. All Things Considers interviews Love on this fascinating story in which author Robert Love tells NPR's Guy Raz how Bernard weathered early rumors of rampant sex and drug use, and later an arrest, to lay the foundation for an empire. Listen to the interview with Robert Love on NPR here (opens an MP3 file).
Fear of Yoga
Robert Love, faculty at Columbia's school of journalism, and former editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, writes at length about the history of yoga as it's appeared in the American press since 1909. After an exhaustive and entertaining review of personalities, movements, and attitudes, Love concludes that yoga is a marketer's dream, a flourishing and trend-proof recreation (vocation?) that can sell anything and everything.
Read more in "Fear of Yoga" at the Columbia Journalism Review web site.