• Complain

Guralnick - Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

Here you can read online Guralnick - Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2012, publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc., genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Guralnick Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
  • Book:
    Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Hachette Digital, Inc.
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2012
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Careless Love is the full, true, and mesmerizing story of Elvis Presleys last two decades, in the long-awaited second volume of Peter Guralnicks masterful two-part biography.

Last Train to Memphis, the first part of Guralnicks two-volume life of Elvis Presley, was acclaimed by the New York Times as a triumph of biographical art. This concluding volume recounts the second half of Elvis life in rich and previously unimagined detail, and confirms Guralnicks status as one of the great biographers of our time.

Beginning with Presleys army service in Germany in 1958 and ending with his death in Memphis in 1977, Careless Love chronicles the unravelling of the dream that once shone so brightly, homing in on the complex playing-out of Elvis relationship with his Machiavellian manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Its a breathtaking revelatory drama that for the first time places the events of a too-often mistold tale in a fresh, believable, and understandable context.

Elvis changes during these years form a tragic mystery that Careless Love unlocks for the first time. This is the quintessential American story, encompassing elements of race, class, wealth, sex, music, religion, and personal transformation. Written with grace, sensitivity, and passion, Careless Love is a unique contribution to our understanding of American popular culture and the nature of success, giving us true insight at last into one of the most misunderstood public figures of our times.

Amazon.com Review

Until Peter Guralnick came out with Last Train to Memphis in 1994, most biographies of Elvis Presley--especially those written by people with varying degrees of access to his inner circle--were filled with starstruck adulation, and those that werent in awe of their subject invariably went out of their way to take potshots at the rock & roll pioneer (with Albert Goldmans 1981 Elvis reaching now-legendary levels of bile and condescension). Guralnicks exploration of Elviss childhood and rise to fame was notable for its factual rigorousness and its intimate appreciation of Presleys musical agenda.

Picking up where the first volume left off, Guralnick sees Elvis through his tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Germany, where he first met--and was captivated by--a 14-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu. We may think we know the story from this point: the return to America, the near-decade of B-movies, eventual marriage to Priscilla, a brief flash of glory with the 68 comeback, and the surrealism of fat Elvis decked out in bejeweled white jumpsuits, culminating in a bathroom death scene. And while that summary isnt exactly false, Guralnicks account shows how little perspective weve had on Elviss life until now, how a gross caricature of the final years has come to stand for the life itself. He treats every aspect of Presleys life--including forays into spiritual mysticism and the growing dependency on prescription drugs--with dignity and critical distance. More importantly, Careless Love continues to show that Guralnick gets what Presley was trying to do as an artist: I see him in the same way that I think he saw himself from the start, the introduction states, as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strand of the American musical tradition. From rock to blues to country to gospel, Guralnick discusses how, at his finest moments, Elvis was able to fulfill that dream. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

Opening with the 25-year-old Presleys nervous return to the United States in March 1960, this second volume of Guralnicks definitive and scrupulous biography then circles back to describe the singers military service in Germany, where he encountered two elements destined to define his post-Army life: prescription drugs and 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was by now a major factor in Elviss career, and Guralnick is the first to explain successfully how the Colonel, a one-time carnival huckster, maintained an enduring hold on a man whose genius was beyond his grasp. Presley believed that they were an unbeatable team, and the Colonels success in keeping Elviss popularity alive during the Army stint seemed to prove it. The subsequent results of the Colonels go-for-the-quick-buck mentality?crummy movies made on the cheap, mediocre soundtracks rather than studio albums?shook Elviss faith in his manager, but he remained loyal through the inevitable artistic and commercial decline. Guralnicks meticulously documented narrative (which draws on interviews with virtually everyone significant) shows the insecure, fatally undisciplined Elvis to be his own worst enemy, closely seconded by the Colonel and the entourage of hangers-on who feared change and disparaged Presleys tentative efforts to grow, especially his spiritual apprenticeships to his hairstylist, Larry, and to Sri Daya Mata. When Elvis roused himself?for his 1968 television comeback, for the legendary Chips Moman-produced sessions of 1969, for the early Las Vegas shows?he was still the most charismatic performer in popular music, with a voice that easily encompassed his rock-and-roll roots and his desire to reach beyond them. But as the 70s wore on, Guralnick shows, he became imprisoned by laziness and passivity, numbing his contempt for himself and those around him with the drugs that finally killed him in 1977. As in volume one, Last Train to Memphis, Guralnick makes his points here through the selection and accretion of detail, arguing in an authors note that retrospective moral judgments [have] no place in describing a life. While some readers may wish he had occasionally stepped back to tell us what it all means, the integrity of this approach is admirable. Many writers have made Presley the vehicle for their own ideas; Guralnick gives us a fallible human being destroyed by forces within as well as without. Its an epic American tragedy, captured here in all its complexity. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Guralnick: author's other books


Who wrote Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976 the scanning uploading and - photo 1

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

For Jacob and Nina and for Alexandra Its difficult to be a legend Its - photo 2

For Jacob and Nina and for Alexandra

Its difficult to be a legend Its hard for me to recognize me You spend a lot - photo 3

Its difficult to be a legend. Its hard for me to recognize me. You spend a lot of time trying to avoid it. The way the world treats you is unbearable. Its unbearable because time is passing and you are not your legend, but youre trapped in it. Nobody will let you out of it except other people who know what it is. But very few people have experienced it, know about it, and I think that can drive you mad. I know it can. I know it can.

James Baldwin, interviewed by Quincy Troupe

THIS IS A STORY of fame. It is a story of celebrity and its consequences. It is, I think, a tragedy, and no more the occasion for retrospective moral judgments than any other biographical canvas should be. Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel, Milan Kundera wrote in what could be taken as a challenge thrown down to history and biography, too. This suspension of judgment is the storytellers morality, the morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. It is not that moral judgment is illegitimate; it is simply that it has no place in describing a life.

Elvis Presley may well be the most written-about figure of our time. He is also in many ways the most misunderstood, both because of our ever-increasing rush to judgment and, perhaps more to the point, simply because he appears to be so well known. It has become almost as impossible to imagine Elvis amid all our assumptions, amid all the false intimacy that attaches to a tabloid personality, as it is to separate the President from the myth of the presidency, John Wayne from the myth of the American West. Its very hard, Elvis declared without facetiousness at a 1972 press conference, to live up to an image. And yet he, as much as his public, appeared increasingly trapped by it.

The Elvis Presley that I am writing about here is a man between the ages of twenty-three and forty-two. His circumstances are far removed from those of the boy whose dreams came true in the twenty-second year of his life. It is not simply that his mother has died, testing his belief in the very meaning of success. With or without his mother by his side, he would have had to grow up; he would have had to face all the complications of adulthood in a situation of almost unbearable public scrutiny, a young man little different in temperament from the solitary child who had constructed a world from his imagination. The army was hard for him not just because he was temperamentally unsuited to it but because it was something he knew he had to succeed at, both for himself and for others. The artistic choices he faced when he returned to an interrupted life were far more ambiguous than the good fortune he had so innocently embraced, and he never came fully to terms with the burden of decision making that those choices placed upon him. His natural ability to adapt, his complex relationship with a manager whom he perceived not just as a mentor but as a talisman of his good luck, served him in both good and bad stead. He constructed a shell to hide his aloneness, and it hardened on his back. I know of no sadder story. But if the last part of Elvis life had to do with the price that is paid for dreams, neither the dreams themselves, nor the aspiration that fueled them, should be forgotten. Without them the story of Elvis Presley would have little meaning.

Ive tried to tell this story as much as possible from Elvis point of view. Although he never kept a diary, left us with no memoirs, wrote scarcely any letters, and rarely submitted to interviews, there is, of course, a wealth of documentation on the life of Elvis Presley, not least his own recorded words, which, while seldom uttered without some public purpose, almost always offer a glimpse of what is going on within. Ive pursued contemporary news accounts, business documents, diaries, fan magazines, critical analyses, and the anecdotal testimony of friends and eyewitnesses not with the intention of imposing all this on the reader but simply to try to understand the story. In the end, of course, one has to cast aside the burden of accumulation and rely on instinct alone. There is always that leap of faith to be made when you accept the idea that you are painting a portrait, not creating a web site. Certainly you have to allow your gaze to wander, it is essential to take every possibility into account, not to prejudge either on the basis of likelihood or personal biasbut you also have to recognize that with the angle of perception changed by just a little, with a slightly different selection of detail, there may be an altogether different view. This is where the leap of faith comes in: at some point, you simply have to believe that by immersing yourself in the subject you have earned your own perspective.

I have spent eleven years with Elvis. Much longer if I go back to the pieces I originally wrote to try to tell the world why I thought his music was so vital, exciting, and culturally significant, how it was part of the same continuum of American vernacular music that produced Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, the Statesmen, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Golden Gate Quartet. I still think thatbut immersion in the subject has changed my view in other, more subtle ways. Once I saw Elvis as a blues singer exclusively (that was my own peculiar prejudice); now I see him in the same way that I think he saw himself from the start, as someone whose ambition it was to encompass every strand of the American musical tradition. And if I am still not equally open to his approach to every one of those strands, I can at least say that I have awakened to the beauty of many of the ballads I once scorned and come to a new appreciation of the gospel quartet tradition that Elvis so thoroughly knew.

In the course of writing these two volumes, I interviewed hundreds of people, some dozens of times. There were moments, certainly, when I felt as if I had at last gained access to Elvis world; just as often, I was made aware that no matter how long one peers in from the outside, it is never quite the view from within. Thats why its so important to keep going backnot just to try to understand the sequence of events but to give the picture a chance to come into deeper focus. You want to try to capture the chipped paint on the doorknob, the muted conversations in the hall; you want the reader to hear the carefree exuberance of Elvis laugheven if none of these things ever fully emerges from the background. Perhaps there is no need to point out that this is a task that can drive both writer and interview subject almost mad. But what struck me again and again, as it has struck me with every book that I have written, was the graciousness of the participants, their own curiosity about what actually happened

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley»

Look at similar books to Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley»

Discussion, reviews of the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.