Download Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream AudioBook Free
The real Hugh Hefner-the amazing inside story of your American icon""Riveting... Watts packs in plenty of gasp-inducing passages.""-Newark Superstar Ledger""Like it or not, Hugh Hefner has affected most of us, so I cherished learning about how precisely and why in the sober biography.""-Chicago Sun Times""This is a fun e book. How could it not be? Watts aims to give a full profile of the person, his mag and their devote social background. Playboy is no longer the cultural power it used to be, but it made a stamp on culture.""-Associated Press""In Steven Watts' exhaustive, illuminating biography Mr. Playboy, Hefner's well suited for living -- designated by his allegiances to Tarzan, Freud, Pepsi-Cola and jazz -- proves to be a kind of gloss on the Protestant work ethic.""-Los Angeles TimesGorgeous young women in revealing poses; extravagant mansion parties filled with superstars; a hot-tub grotto, elegant smoking overcoats, and round spinning beds; the hedonistic quest for uninhibited gender. Put these images mutually and an individual name springs to mind-Hugh Hefner. From his stunning introduction of Playboy mag and the dizzying expansion of his leisure empire to his recent tv hit The Females Next Door, the publisher has enticed public attention and controversy for many years. But how did a man who might be simultaneously socially astute and morally unconventional, part Bill Gates and part Casanova, also advance into a body at the forefront of ethnic change?In Mr. Playboy, historian and biographer Steven Watts argues that, along the way of becoming fabulously wealthy and famous, Hefner has profoundly improved American life and values. Granted unprecedented usage of the person and his organization, Watts traces Hef's life and job from his midwestern, Methodist upbringing and the first publication of Playboy in 1953 through the turbulent sixties, self-indulgent seventies, reactionary eighties, and traditionalist nineties, up for this. He discloses that Hefner, from the beginning, believed he could overturn cultural norms and take America with him.This interesting portrait illustrates four ways that Hefner and Playboy stood at the guts of several ethnic upheavals that remade the postwar United States. The publisher played out a crucial role in the erotic trend that upended traditional notions of tendencies and expectation regarding gender. He emerged as one of the most important advocates of your rapidly expanding consumer culture, flooding Playboy visitors with images of materials abundance and a leisurely lifestyle. He turned out instrumental-with his important magazine, syndicated tv shows, elegant nightclubs, swanky resorts, and movie and musical projects-in making popular culture into a prominent power in many people's lives. Ironically, Hefner also became a controversial power in the movement for women's rights. Although advocating women's erotic flexibility and their liberation from traditional family constraints, the publisher became a whipping young man for feminists who viewed him as a prophet for a fresh kind of guy domination.Throughout, Watts offers singular insights in to the real man behind the flamboyant public persona. He shows Hefner's personal dichotomies-the pleasure seeker and the workaholic, the consort of many Playmates and the original passionate, the family man and the Gatsby-like sponsor of lavish get-togethers at his Chicago and Los Angeles mansions who looks forward to well-publicized affairs with numerous Playmates, the supporter of life's simple pleasures who hobnobs with the Hollywood elite.Punctuated throughout with explanations and anecdotes of life at the Playboy Mansions, Mr. Playboy instructs the compelling and uniquely American storyline of how one person with a provocative idea, a finger on the pulse of popular opinion, and a passion for his work improved the course of modern background.
- Spans from Hefner's youth to the introduction of Playboy mag and the expansion of t