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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
