An enthusiastic portrayal of an iconic performer.
In a spectacular Las Vegas show, Elvis Presley (1935-1977) revived his flagging career.
Entertainment journalist Zoglin (Hope: Entertainer of the Century, 2014, etc.) uses Elvis’ 1969 comeback to recount a history of Las Vegas from 1931, when Nevada became the first state to legalize gambling, to its current iteration as a vacation destination boasting lavish, theme park–like hotels, designer shops, gourmet restaurants, blockbuster performers (Celine Dion, Elton John, and Lady Gaga, to name a few), and high-tech, hugely expensive extravaganzas, such as Cirque du Soleil. Before focusing on Elvis, the author reprises stories about “the boozing, macho Rat Pack” and many other headliners who drew crowds at the city’s glitziest hotel, the Sands. “Sinatra was the king,” Zoglin writes, “Vegas’s undisputed Most Valuable Player,” selling out his shows and attracting wealthy gamblers to the casinos. The 1960s, though, saw a “seismic shift, in music as well as in the rest of the culture”; along with the advent of rock ’n’ roll and the Beatles, tumultuous political events such as Vietnam, anti-war protests, and civil rights activism all affected the Vegas strip. Elvis, too, had gone through “a rough decade…in many ways a disastrous one.” His early trajectory to fame had been interrupted by two years of military service. When he returned in 1960, at the advice of his domineering manager Col. Tom Parker, he gave up live performing, instead appearing in a spate of lackluster movies. By 1969, writes the author, both Elvis and Parker agreed that he needed to return to the concert stage—beginning with Vegas. Drawing on scores of interviews, Zoglin paints a vibrant picture of Elvis’ thrilling, electrical presence: “everyone was dumbstruck,” one woman said. “It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.” Elvis’ performance, writes the author, “set a new standard for Las Vegas. The star was now his own spectacle.” Sadly, success proved brief: Less than a decade later, the star was dead.
An enthusiastic portrayal of an iconic performer.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5119-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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