Background
Billy Don Moyers was born June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Oklahoma, and grew up in Marshall, Texas, United States.
( This ?provocative and ?absorbing (Star Tribune) compa...)
This ?provocative and ?absorbing (Star Tribune) companion book to Bill Moyers acclaimed PBS series invites readers into conversations with some of the most captivating voices on the scene today, in what Kirkus calls ?a glittering array of discussions. From Jon Stewart on politics and media to Michael Pollan on food, The Wire creator David Simon on the mean streets of our cities, James Cone and Shelby Steele on race in the age of Obama, Robert Bly and Nikki Giovanni on the power of poetry, Barbara Ehrenreich on the hard times of working Americans, and Karen Armstrong on faith and compassion, Moyers own intelligence and insight match that of his guests and their discussions animate many of the most salient issues of our time. With extensive commentary from Moyers, marked by his customary ?respect, intelligence, curiosity, humor, and graciousness (Booklist), here are the debates; cultural currents; and, above all, lively minds that shape the conversation of democracy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159558773X/?tag=2022091-20
(At last, the paperback edition of the monumental best-se...)
At last, the paperback edition of the monumental best-seller (almost half a million copies in print!) that has changed the way Americans think about sickness and health -- the companion volume to the landmark PBS series of the same name. In a remarkably short period of time, Bill Moyers's Healing And The Mind has become a touchstone, shaping the debate over alternative medical treatments and the role of the mind in illness and recovery in a way that few books have in recent memory. With almost half a million copies in print, it is already a classic -- the most widely read and influential book of its kind. In a series of fascinating interviews with world-renowned experts and laypeople alike, Bill Moyers explores the new mind/body medicine. Healing And The Mind shows how it is being practiced in the treatment of stress, chronic disease, and neonatal problems in several American hospitals; examines the chemical basis of emotions, and their potential for making us sick (and making us well); explores the fusion of traditional Chinese medicine with modern Western practices in contemporary China; and takes an up-close, personal look at alternative healing therapies, including a Massachusetts center that combines Eastern meditation and Western group therapy, and a California retreat for cancer patients who help each other even when a cure is impossible. Combining the incisive yet personal interview approach that made A World Of Ideas a feast for the mind and the provocative interplay of text and art that made The Power Of Myth a feast for the imagination, Healing And The Mind is a landmark work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385476876/?tag=2022091-20
Billy Don Moyers was born June 5, 1934, in Hugo, Oklahoma, and grew up in Marshall, Texas, United States.
He started college at North Texas State College, where he became class president. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1956, then spent a year studying church history at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before returning to study for a bachelor of divinity degree at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which he completed in 1959.
By the age of 15, Moyers was working as a reporter on his local paper, the Marshall News Messenger. In 1954 he worked on Lyndon B. Johnson's Senate campaign and then, at Johnson's urging, transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in journalism and worked at KTBC, the Johnson's television station. In 1960
Moyers abandoned plans to pursue graduate work in American studies in order to join the campaign staff of Lyndon Johnson as a personal assistant, then a special assistant, during the Kennedy-Johnson presidential campaign. In 1961 Moyers became associate director of public affairs, in effect the chief lobbyist and public relations director of the Peace Corps, working under R. Sargent Shriver. He became deputy director of the Peace Corps in 1963.
On the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip to Texas. When he heard that Kennedy had been shot, Moyers flew to Dallas to offer his services to Lyndon Johnson, sending a handwritten note, "I'm here if you need me. "
From that moment until the end of 1966, Moyers served Johnson in a variety of important roles under the traditional and ambiguous title of "special assistant to the President. " Moyers coordinated the work of the 14 task forces that produced the legislative foundation for Johnson's "Great Society" programs in a sweeping series of bills designed to implement the "War on Poverty. " These domestic programs were the most ambitious and progressive social welfare measures to be enacted since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though their impact was blunted by the burdens imposed by the war in Vietnam.
Moyers helped to write the Democratic party platform of 1964, which had a strong commitment to civil rights. As Johnson's liaison with the advertising firm that was preparing television advertising for the campaign, Moyers ordered a strong attack on Barry Goldwater. Moreover, he approved of the famous "Daisy" ad, which showed a young girl counting the petals on a daisy, then cut to a countdown to a nuclear explosion with a voiceover of Johnson speaking of the importance of peace. The ad evoked protests from the Goldwater campaign and was aired only once. Though it never explicitly mentioned Goldwater or the Republicans, the ad was a highly effective evocation of Goldwater's reputation for nuclear bellicosity. As a special assistant, Moyers acted as an adviser, as chief speech writer, as chief of staff, and from July 1965 until he resigned in December 1966, as White House press secretary, where he was highly regarded by the working press.
As the Vietnam War deepened, Moyers became one of the most visible doves in the White House, and he became increasingly isolated from Johnson. Moyers resigned in December 1966, with considerable bitterness on Johnson's part, to become publisher of Newsday, a large circulation daily paper on Long Island with a reputation for conservative political views. Moyers hired star writers such as Pete Hamill and, for special reports, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Saul Bellow. He led the paper in a progressive direction and to a series of journalistic awards. But the conservative Harry Guggenheim, who owned a controlling interest in the paper, withdrew his support of Moyers and sold out to the Times-Mirror company. Moyers left the paper in 1970. Moyers took time out to write Listening to America (1971), based on interviews conducted on a tour across America.
He then turned to a successful career as a television journalist for CBS and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). At PBS, Moyers found he had the freedom to examine and tell stories that interested him in whatever way he wanted to present them. Moyers was editor-in-chief of "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS from 1971 to 1976 and again from 1978 to 1981. He was editor and chief correspondent of the "CBS Reports" series from 1976 to 1978 and senior news analyst for CBS News, 1981-1986. Beginning in 1987 he was executive editor of Public Affairs TV, Inc. , an independent production company making documentary and public affairs series for public television. His television work won virtually every major broadcasting award.
Moyers' television style was a traditional mix of news and documentary formats, in which he acted as narrator and interviewer. His series were distinguished not for innovations in form so much as for their combination of deep seriousness, earnest curiosity, attentiveness, and respect to his subjects (without, however, giving up his own views). Moyers held a consistent and clear set of values that were progressive and humane, and he possessed an ability to aim his material in such a way as to be both popular and intellectually lively. As part of his series "A Walk Through the Twentieth Century with Bill Moyers, " Moyers tackled such subjects as the arms race, labor history, and the influence of television on political campaigns. The most noted show of the series was "Marshall Texas, Marshall Texas, " a description of the town in which he grew up, containing interviews of friends, residents, and former teachers. The series included a long interview with James Farmer, a civil rights leader who also grew up in Marshall, but whom Moyers had not known at the time he lived there because of the culture of segregation (hence the image of Marshall as two towns, and the repetition of the name in the title of the show).
In 1988 Moyers released the six-part series "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. " Campbell, for many years a professor of comparative religion at Sarah Lawrence College and author of a number of influential works on world mythology, talked with Moyers about myth as a way of coming to an experience of "the rapture of being alive" as Moyers, trained as a Baptist minister, engaged with him in a search for the cosmic truth behind religious doctrines and mythical tales. In a five-part PBS series that premiered in 1993, Moyers examined the connection between emotions and physical response.
Moyers paid visits to hospitals in the United States where nontraditional therapies are being used: a hospital in Massachusetts uses Buddhist meditation to aid patients with unyielding pain; and a Boston hospital showed how "the relaxation response" has been beneficial in the treatment of insomnia, hypertension, and infertility. Georgetown was slated to be the first medical school with a thorough course of study in mind-body techniques. Dr. David Eisenberg, who developed an "unconventional medicine" course at Harvard, reported that 34 percent of the people they surveyed had tried at least one unconventional therapy in the past year for primarily chronic conditions, such as back pain, insomnia, and headaches, a percentage that converts to about 61 million people.
Moyers' series reinforced a growing popularity of alternative medicine. The companion book soared to the top of the best-seller lists, and PBS scored ratings with Healing and the Mind double what they usually earned at that time of the year. Moyers was not as fortunate with his 1995 series, The Language of Life, in which he spent eight installments celebrating poetry readings and workshops which were flourishing after decades of relative disappearance.
The next issues Moyers tackled were ones more close to home for the ordained Southern Baptist minister. Newsweek called his Spring 1996, five-part series, The Wisdom of Faith "disappointing. " The show was to center around religious guru Houston Smith, one of the foremost scholars of world religions; yet Kenneth Woodward said it lacked focus. Moyers, he said, was unable to decide if the programs were about Smith and his experiences or about the six "wisdom traditions" of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The fall of 1996 brought better reception of his probe of the first book of the Bible. Genesis: A Living Conversation was a ten-part "outreach, " bringing together small groups of scholars, writers, and other intellectuals for hour-long discussions.
Kenneth Woodward and Anne Underwood of Newsweek commended Moyers for performing "a public service by discussing Genesis in extended conversation. " However, they recognized that the series did little to explain why the stories found their literary forms or how they influence the Biblical material and message.
( This ?provocative and ?absorbing (Star Tribune) compa...)
(At last, the paperback edition of the monumental best-se...)
Quotations: "Moyers makes virtually no attempt to place the poet in a larger social context-to view poetry as a profession (or, perhaps more to the point, to analyze what it means that ours is a culture where it's all but impossible to be a professional poet), " Leithauser wrote.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Moyers told Christianity Today that he perceives himself more as a student than as an adversarial journalist. Moyers wanted people to "listen and understand, " not to change their beliefs, and "to talk to each other without that kind of false protocol and superficial tact we sometimes pretend we have. "
Moyers married Judith Suzanne Davidson (a producer) on December 18, 1954. They have three children and five grandchildren. His son William Cope Moyers (CNN producer, Hazelden Foundation spokesman) struggled to overcome alcoholism. His other son, John Moyers, assisted in the foundation of TomPaine. com".