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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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