Rating: 
Summary: An American tragedy
Review: This book brought a lot of unexpected emotions up in me, mostly painful emotions. I felt a real sense of frustration throughout this book. Its amazing to read from a distance how Elvis' character flaws caused him to surround himself with weak, servile people who refused to see or help avoid the inevitable approaching train wreck. I found myself thinking of ways to help Elvis out in my head. Frustrating.
Why didn't they pull the plug and move on after say the Aloha Satellite concert, they'd made billions at this point and Elvis was obviously fading and weak at this time? Where were you Colonel?
Did Elvis start to believe the 'Godhood' title eggreigously put on him by the public?
How was it rationlized in Elvis' mind that the release that prescription drugs gave him was acceptable?
More questions than answers, painful questions. I see this book as a cautionary tale about the immense pressure of stardom, which Elvis met headon and conquered, accepting his situation fully, lifting the spirit of America in the process on his back. Life is truly new every day, and despite all his huge victories, at the end Elvis was broken and beaten, if not in spirit in body and mind.
Thats a bitter truth to swallow, best we can do now is honor him in our minds and our hearts.
Rating: 
Summary: Poignant and Sad, Never a Work of Caricature
Review: We all think we know the post-Army Elvis. He's the gradually fattening lounge act on steroids (and other assorted chemicals) who cranked out awful movies with mechanical regularity. His talent rebounded in the late 60s with his NBC comeback special and some of his live performances to remind us what he meant when his first performances made a young Bob Dylan feel like he was breaking out of jail. Reading Guralnick's successor to "Last Train From Memphis," one is reminded of the old line that airplane pilots experience 98 percent sheer boredom and 2 percent sheer terror. This resembles Elvis's life, enclosed in a dual prison of Graceland's walls and the companionship of the "Memphis Mafia"--his cronies and pals whose lives consisted of serving the King's often bizarre whims, and awaiting his generous handouts. The predicament echoes China's last emperors in their Forbidden City, ruling a landscape they can no longer see and in which they no longer mattered. This book oozes sadness, and I sensed that Guralnick, whose prose crackles with energy even describing Elvis at his most pathetic, felt personally disappointed with the great waste of talent Elvis's life became. In the preface and on the book's last page, Guralnick makes reference to the mythic Elvis we encountered in "Last Train." In between, a chronicle of pathos unfolds. Guralnick could have used the decline and fall to interrogate the American mythology Elvis once fulfilled, to show how ultimately false it proved. Instead, we get a touchingly human portrait of a man living in the chaos that celebrity creates. I wouldn't wish celebrity on my worst enemy. One is struck by Elvis's loneliness, by the sense of loss occasioned by his mother's death, and from which he clearly never recovered. The mythic Elvis is still here, particularly in the burst of achievement from the '68 Comeback Special, through the American Recordings with Chips Moman, and the early stands in Vegas. But even when recounting the saddest days of his apotheosis in the mid-70s, Guralnick's tale suddenly shows Elvis explode out of his stupor with charisma and passion, leading his band through the occasional great session or show. Elvis's bizarre obsession with law enforcement and completely surreal desire to meet Richard Nixon and volunteer to serve the country as a Narcotics Agent has something of greatness about it. All that vitality had to go somewhere, and if it's not fed with healthy outlets, it manifests itself strangely. When I visited Graceland as a tourist a few years ago, the walls still seethed with the boredom the place must have witnessed. Guralnick captures the pathos without descending to the pathetic, while still maintaining a perspetive on his subject that dilutes none of the passion.
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