The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. But, like many fans, I've always been limited by the media and the 'myth' of Elvis. Here's a book that takes you behind the scenes and gives you the real story. Believe it or not, he's an extremely insecure, frail human being. Yes, it's sad in many ways. The drugs, the objectification of women (he didn't respect his marriage at all), the pain from losing his mom, retreating to his room all the time, the Memphis Mafia always hanging around him like puppy dogs waiting for the next car he'd buy them. Silence is the resting place of the soul. It's sacred. And necessary for new thoughts to be born. That's what my pills are for...to get as close as possible to that silence." - p. 456 He used to say to me, 'Honey, you're not going to change a forty-year-old man.' But in another way there was also this very naive, this almost infantile quality about him - very innocent and very pure, kind of pitiful. He definitely evoked a protective quality - he called me 'mommy,' and I wasn't the mother of his childd. But I was an incredibly maternal presence in his life." - p. 582

And Elvis himself? A complicated mix of guilessness and sweet innocence, with something more ambitious and single-minded, entangled with a charisma and natural blazing talent underpinned by a genuine spirituality. The image of him ringing his parents every night from hysterical tours and Hollywood film sets, of bringing home Natalie Wood to stay with his mum and dad, of buying them Graceland to compensate for the single room and shared housing he grew up in is a testament to real feeling.

Release

I took the plunge. "Elvis, if we're gods, or at least have this 'divinity' in us, why do we need drugs?" The colored folks began singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw."

Connect your Spotify account to your Last.fm account and scrobble everything you listen to, from any Spotify app on any device or platform. Especially towards the last half of the book, several of Elvis's "girlfriends" complain of his almost sex-less love making. i think what's sad the most is that he was always innocent underneath it all. being a psychologist, i saw someone who was still very connected to his mother though she passed away. (a lot of the women he was "with" felt they often took on the role of "mother," talking to him in baby talk, responding to him when he called them "mommy.") from the time of her death, it was all downhill from there for elvis. that's another reason why i wasn't as traumatized by his death; he finally go to be with her, he finally got to rest. the guy was never at peace.

Notes

In his 1954 essay, "The Loss of the Creature," Walker Percy contrasts the experience of Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, commander of the first group of Europeans to set eyes on the Grand Canyon, with that of a 20th-century tourist. "It can be imagined:," he writes, "One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one's feet. Later the government set the place aside as a national park, hoping to pass along to millions the experience of Cardenas. Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cardenas saw?" As, I'm sure, you have guessed, Percy's answer is- decidedly - "no." "It is almost impossible [to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon]," he proposes, "because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind." You can't see it because you're too busy trying to confirm all the received ideas you already have about it. Less enjoyable than part 1, but no less well researched. If there is a flaw, it's just that there was so much information to convey that readability got sacrificed. This is understandable & forgivable. And then again, this part of the story is a tragedy. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth

I was also acquainted with the boyfriend of the sister of Elvis's last fiancee. I was hearing some of the stories of Elvis's aberrant behavior while obviously on drugs two years before the publication of .Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated. 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. Elvis preferred "smooching", adolescent-like making out (kissing, fondling, embracing, feeling-up) with a girl rather than doing the old hump-and-get-it-& -get-off.