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THE FATHER OF SPIN
By Larry Tye
Crown, 306 pages, $27.50
Edward L. Bernays, the “father of public relations” and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, guided a variety of major marketing campaigns, ranging from portraying Ivory soap as fun sculpting material for kids to agitating on behalf of the United Fruit Company for the 1954 military overthrow of Guatemala’s socialist regime. This portrait of the quirky PR pioneer is often revealing: ” `Propaganda,’ ” says author Larry Tye, “was a word Bernays seldom used in a pejorative sense.”