Love, Robert. 2010. The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Viking.
Perhaps surprisingly, the "Great Oom" is actually a person, namely a fellow called Pierre Arnold Bernard, who played a key role in the importation and development of hatha yoga into the United States. The book chronicles his Midwest origins, including his initial encounters with yoga in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska, his sojourn on the west coast, his years in New York City and then his years of success and eventual decline, brought on by the Great Depression, in the small town of Nyack-on-Hudson. He received the "Great Oom" nickname from the press, and it ended up following him throughout his life.
Bernard's personal journey offers plenty to interest the reader. It also sheds a broader light on American life, especially in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Then, like now, celebrities and the rich gravitated to Eastern mysticism and health fads. Then as now the media loved a moral panic, especially one involving the bodies of the rich and famous. Then, as now, people like Bernard become less daring with age and success. Indeed, my one complaint about the book concerns how little the reader learns about how Bernard saw his own public and private evolution over the course of his life. Overall, I quite enjoyed the book.
If you think you'll like it, you will.
I purchased this book many years ago at the Crazy Wisdom bookstore in Ann Arbor.