A smoothly detailed study of one shady man—an exploiter and murder suspect who drove his meal ticket to the grave—and not...
Colonel Parker: con man, impresario, criminal—though perhaps best summed up by his military discharge report, “Psychosis, Psychogenic Depression, acute, on basis of Constitutional Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability.”
Journalist Nash (Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, not reviewed, etc.), who makes heroic attempts at an even hand—“the Colonel was all the things he appeared to be, both good and bad”—nonetheless has a difficult time fleshing out the former. What he was good at was making sure he got a whopping share of his clients’ money. Otherwise, he was a mighty unsavory character, starting with the author’s conjecture that he was involved in a murder back in Holland, which caused him to flee to the US. He became the arch carnival man before transferring his overbearing sales talents to music promotion, representing Ernest Tubbs, Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, and Hank Snow, and then taking on Elvis as his cottage industry. Nash suggests Parker “single-handedly took the carnival tradition first to rock and roll, and then to modern mass entertainment . . . by merely applying the exploitational tactics of the barker to his own client, he drew a straight line from the bally platform . . . to the hullabalooed concert stage.” He was also a paranoid controller with a need to diminish and degrade, a man who mulcted his client with an absurd 50% commission rate (and no cut in the peripheral sales), and who drove Elvis mercilessly to perform, brushing off the performer's panic attacks and fears that led to his drug abuse, as well as his obvious physical and emotional decline. Yes, as a Parker crony said, “Nobody killed Elvis except Elvis,” but with friends like Parker, who needs an executioner?
A smoothly detailed study of one shady man—an exploiter and murder suspect who drove his meal ticket to the grave—and not even praiseworthy for his business acumen.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1301-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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