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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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