Superman Celebration Hosts Book Launch

Metropolis will host author Larry Tye and the Random House release of his book, SUPERMAN: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. 

Superman is the first full-fledged biography not just of the Man of Steel, but of the visionary writers and artists, publishers and performers, who kept aloft the red-and-blue-clad icon through seven decades and counting.

Larry Tye shows us how Superman like few other mythical characters before or since has evolved in a way that offers a Rorschach test of his changing times and our highest aspirations.

Larry Tye runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship, which is designed to help the media do a better job covering critical health care issues. Each year, it trains 10 medical journalists from newspaper, radio station and TV outlets from across the Country, on topics ranging from public health and mental health to insuring the uninsured.

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, and covered government and business at the Anniston Star in Alabama. Tye’s first book was The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth Of Public Relations. Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora, looks at the renewal underway across the Jewish world, from Boston to Buenos Aires. Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, explores how the black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars launched the first successful black trade union, helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement and gave birth to today’s African-American middle class. Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy, collaboration with Kitty Dukakis, is partly a journalist’s first person account of Psychiatry’s most controversial treatment, partly a portrait of how that treatment gave one woman a new sense of control and hope after decades of debilitating depression. Tye’s latest book, Satchel: The Life and times of an American Legend, is the biography of two American icons-Satchel Paige, arguably the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball, and Jim Crow, the amalgam of Southern laws that mandated separation of the races everywhere from public bathrooms to schools and buses. Satchel spent most of last summer on the New York Times bestseller list, was named a Times Notable Book, and recently won two prizes- the Casey Award and the Seymour Medal- as best baseball book of 2009. Tye was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. Tye recently began work for Random House on another biography of another American hero: Robert  F. Kennedy.

SUPERMAN: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero  is set to be released June 12 by Random House, but fans can buy an early copy during the Superman Celebration as well as meet the author and get the book signed. Neal Cole, webmaster for supermansupersite.com, will MC the Q & A for Larry Tye on Friday, June 8 at 10 AM on the main stage in Metro Tent. Copies of the book will be available at the tent prior to and immediately following the Q & A and Larry Tye will be available for book signing from 11 AM to 12 PM under the tent. Larry will participate in a panel discussion with guest panelists on Saturday, June 9 at 1:00 in the Planet Krypton building on Market Street.

Fans can also meet Larry at Artist Alley at 8th and Market on Friday from 1 PM to 6 PM and on Saturday from 10 AM to 12 PM and 2:30 to 6 PM. The 34th Superman Celebration is held in Metropolis, IL. June 7-10. For more information contact Metropolis Chamber of Commerce, 618-524-2714 or email office@metropolisplanet.com