Guralnick concludes his majestic two-volume biography of Elvis Presley with copious evidence of Elvis’s creative and personal plunge. Last Train to Memphis (1994) brilliantly illuminated the mystery of Elvis’s genius—what it consisted of and where it came from. The unanswered mystery here is how someone who reshaped American culture between 1954 and 1958 could have so completely insulated himself from that culture for most of the rest of his life. After Elvis came out of the army in 1960, he increasingly became a clock-puncher. The times left him behind as he gamely acted in inanely trashy movies and sang inanely trashy songs in order to fulfill contractual commitments. Guralnick meticulously documents manager Colonel Tom Parker’s cutthroat dealings with RCA Records and the movie studios, which resulted in staggering paychecks for both Presley and Parker (by the mid-’70s, Parker was splitting his sole client’s earnings 50—50). While his celebrated 1968 TV special rejuvenated Elvis professionally, the overstuffed-jumpsuit years that followed had few aesthetic or personal high points. Hangers-on tirelessly served the King’s whims, including multiple simultaneous affairs and the incredibly debilitating pharmaceutical habits that eventually did him in. Unconditionally loved by his audiences no matter how bloated, doped up, and incompetent he became, Elvis indulged obsessions with guns and karate and even took a stoned trip to the Oval Office, where he persuaded a bemused President Nixon to make him a federal narcotics agent. As his sometime spiritual advisor and hairdresser Larry Geller puts it, “The outside world was a distant place he ventured out into but never really lived in.” Careless Love is about claustrophobia, insularity, and disintegration: exactly the opposite of the previous volume’s subjects. We miss the cultural context of the 1960s and ’70s, but then, so did Elvis. The diffuseness of this life is reflected in Guralnick’s narrative. Nevertheless, this sequel to his exhilarating first volume is the most meticulously researched and sympathetic, honest portrait of Elvis we are likely to see.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-33222-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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