Punishingly lurid, illuminating little about Elvis and less about the seemingly interchangeable women who fell for him.
A big hunk o’ sordid details about Elvis Presley’s many women.
The third Elvis-themed book by Nash (The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley, 2004, etc.) depicts an enormously magnetic persona who frequently wielded his power as a sex symbol. The author includes seemingly every woman who fell into his orbit, from his wife, Priscilla, to one-night stands, to more long-term paramours like Ann-Margret. Though Nash draws heavily from the available literature, both major biographies and life-with-the-King tell-alls, she also conducted numerous interviews with the strippers, fans, co-stars and (especially) beauty queens with whom he consorted. In the process, she digs up surprisingly intimate details about Presley’s sexual proclivities, and makes it clear that as Don Juans go, Elvis was exceedingly insecure. Early in his career he gravitated toward underage women—14-year-olds seemed to be his preferred make-out partners—and his attraction to the Priscilla Beaulieu while in the Army reflects an instinct to seduce women he could easily control. Though he later preferred more mature girlfriends, he never found a way to be completely comfortable with them. He showered them with gifts and jewelry, flew them to Vegas or Graceland and shared his increasingly esoteric religious ideas with them, but rarely seemed to care deeply about them. Further, his prescription-pill addiction destroyed both his libido and his conscience. Nash makes much of Elvis’ close relationship with his mother and the fact that Elvis was an “untwinned twin”—his twin brother was stillborn—and she occasionally tethers a critical relationship to subconscious efforts to reconcile those lost connections. But such pop-psychology ruminations add only the thinnest veneer of gravitas to an overstuffed, flatly written catalogue of bedroom tales and laments about how Presley shipwrecked himself. Tellingly, Nash’s most intense investigative efforts are dedicated to whether Priscilla was a virgin before she met Elvis.
Punishingly lurid, illuminating little about Elvis and less about the seemingly interchangeable women who fell for him.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-169984-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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