Guralnick's admirable restraint in dealing with the more lurid aspects of Elvis's later life seems to have made him wary of any sort of analysis at all, depriving the reader of his knowledge of the passions and emotional needs that fueled Elvis's music and life. There are no cheap attempts to psychoanalyze Elvis in this volume, no moralistic judgments or forays into pathography. Guralnick manages to recount such events without indulging in the faintest bit of voyeurism or sensationalism. Unlike such earlier Elvis biographers as Albert Goldman (''Elvis'') and Peter Whitmer (''The Inner Elvis''), Mr. Instead, he gives us a harrowing - and to many readers, familiar - litany of lost opportunities, failed movies, manic enthusiasms (for horses, karate, guns and police work) and crazed drug binges.

Guralnick has few opportunities in these pages to demonstrate his intimate understanding of Elvis's musicianship or his appreciation of Elvis's place in the continuum of American music. By the very nature of its subject matter this volume tells a far more depressing tale than its predecessor, chronicling Elvis's long, slow slide, despite his 1968-69 comeback, into maudlin commercialism and self-loathing.īecause the book is more about the consequences of fame than its achievement, more about business decisions and in-fighting among friends and associates than it is about music, Mr. ''Careless Love,'' the follow-up to that earlier volume, picks up with the 23-year-old Elvis serving a two-year Army stint in Germany and ends with his drug-fueled death in 1977 at the age of 42. It was a book that not only captured the magic electricity of the King's early years, but also explicated his invention of a revolutionary musical idiom, a style lovingly built upon a host of earlier genres from gospel to blues, rhythm-and-blues to country, with a voice that would help reroute the course of American music. ''Last Train to Memphis'' (1994), the first volume of Peter Guralnick's life of Elvis Presley, was a model of biographical scholarship: erudite and ardent and almost novelistic in its conjuring of Elvis's spectacular rise.

Last train to memphis book review