Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley - 'The richest portrait of Presley we have ever had' Sunday Telegraph

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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. I took the plunge. "Elvis, if we're gods, or at least have this 'divinity' in us, why do we need drugs?" Overall, a great read that clued me in on what now seems like a gaping hole in my musical education and understanding of American culture. In many ways Elvis is the USA. I get a sense that Elvis never fully developed into a man. He remained an insecure boy, afraid of the dark but owner of an amazing talent and ability to charm people. The empire he created with all its wealth and privilege did nothing to assuage his inner emptiness. Prescription drugs provided him with something only he could understand. It was a hugely destructive choice and in the end forced him to become a ridiculous caricature of himself "the living legend is fat and ludicrously aping his former self..." He just seemed to "run out of gas". of course, ultimately the drugs killed him. It is such a shame. At one time he was "a champion, the only one in his class". 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.

This is as interesting on the development of US teen culture and the burgeoning post-war music business as it is on the man himself, and the amounts of money being generated from the Elvis franchise are just jaw-dropping. I was three quarters of the way through this book before I realized that it is the first of two gigantic volumes, and I was enjoying it so much that it made me excited because I wanted a lot more. This volume covers Elvis' youth up until his deployment in Germany with the Army.

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If, on the other hand, your only image of Elvis is as a star of the insipid, cookie cutter, musical comedy (I use the term loosely) movies that he turned out after his military discharge, such as "Viva Las Vegas" and "Girls! Girls! Girls!," or the even later image of a bloated, overweight, jump-suited lounge singer, then you might enjoy the story of the singer’s climb to fame, a singer who still holds the top spot for record sales by a solo performer. If so, Last Train to Memphis is your book.

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 there are many ways to interpret his life: as a greek tragedy, as the fall of the american dream, as a religious tale of someone who got totally swept up by every sin in the book. you name it, elvis lived it. I grew up in Memphis in the late 60s. In those days it was impossible to not run into Elvis. Especially when I was a teen in the early '70s. He was everywhere. Always seeking recognition and attention from fans. He loved being idolized. 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. He surrounded himself with predatory types, buying the love and allegiance of friends, family, and strangers alike with spur-of-the-moment gifts: sports cars, luxury cars, jewelry, homes and even -at one stage- horses. Almost every friend he ever had was more than happy to prey on Elvis's largesse.It's an interesting enough account but what anyone really wants to read about are the details of his fall from grace.

Elvis set some all-time records for celebrity, audacity and exuberance. He helped the world break out of a great number of out-of-date constraints and begin new epochs in popular music and style. He spread a joyous sort of Americaness to the rest of the world. For those things he will be remembered, forever, with love and happiness.

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Musical innovation is full of danger to the state, for when modes of music change, the laws of the state always change with them. (Plato, The Republic)

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. My only reserve about Careless Love is the unnecessary use of profanity. But other than that, the book is a real must. He was a man who thought and acted like a boy. Always craving an entourage that never left him, none of the people who surrounded him could help his addiction to a plethora of drugs. His autopsy showed an enlarged heart, liver damage as well as a painful bowel condition caused by excess drug usage. At the time of his death, at least 14 different drugs were in his body. The amount of codeine was ten times a normally prescribed level. His addiction to quaaludes brought toxic levels to a body that over abused drugs for many years.Also, while Elvis definitely had strange habits and loved the accoutrements of stardom, he was genuinely a nice and caring person. The book has literally a hundred quotes from people of all walks of life who found him to be open, an "innocent" really, who treated everyone with respect and interest. You really feel that you'd have enjoyed meeting him and becoming a member of his entourage for a week. 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. This is the really sad biography of an immature man who built an insular environment around himself, reinforced by an entourage completely reliant on his largesse. A mamma’s boy who never really recovered from his mother's death and who was incapable of having a mature relationship with women. Women grew weary of the self obsessed, narcissistic little boy, who like Peter Pan, simply refused to grow up. By the time of his death, he was only 42 years old with a bloated body, a voice that could not deliver, and performances at his shows were mediocre at best. 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.