Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating History
Review: This is a book for those who love American music, not those looking for lurid scandal. Guralnick's respectful yet honest history of Elvis's rise to fame is endlessly engrossing. Not only do we meet Elvis, Gladys, and Vernon in the years before the myths took over, we meet lesser-known yet facsinating characters as Sam Phillips, the idealistic founder of Sun Records, and Dewey Phillips, the eccentric DJ who first played Elvis on the air. As Guralnick presents Memphis in the 50's, it seems so real one almost feels as though it could be visited today.You don't have to be an Elvis fan to enjoy this biography.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: this is a good book on one of musics most important Artists ever.everybody knows that LITTLE RICHARD Is THE KING OF ROCK-N-ROLL!but that Elvis was a important Musical figure.this book does a solid job of tracing his upbringing and his rise into the spotlight.
Rating:
Summary: The first & perhaps last major biography of a major figure
Review: This is a great book, written with decency, respect, and compassion. It is wonderfully researched, and Guralnick's end notes discusses possible alternatives and the difficulty, sometimes impossibility, of reconciling different versions provided by even on-the-scene participants. It is also, culmulatively powerfully and in the end heartbreaking. Finally, it comes a long way in answering perhaps the key biographical question about Elvis--"Did Elvis know he was Elvis" and makes it clear that despite all his self-doubt and self-denigration, he did, that Elvis had ambition, drive, and a vision of what his music should sound like and what diverse strains of American music it would incorporate. It is commonplace in rock history to say if it hadn't been Elvis it would have been somebody else, and that probably is true for the creation of rock n roll, but does the singer an incredible disservice too. REID MITCHELL
Rating:
Summary: A slice of Southern history
Review: This is one of those rare biographies that transcend its subject. The rise of Elvis is fascinating and true Elvis fans will find a wealth of information in the book, but there is also much more to take from this well researched tome. The discussion of the music of Memphis, the sources that influenced Elvis and the rise of rock and roll make this book a terrific addition to anyone's library who is interested in music or the south. The relationship between Presley and his many women is discussed here and so is the complex interaction between him and his family. Perhaps his most interesting relationship is with his manager, Colonel Parker. How that relationship shaped his career certainly makes for an interesting read. The author does as fine a job as I have ever seen of documenting his sources and treating his subject with respect, but not awe. This is one of the best bio's I have ever read. I highly recommend this book to students of Elvis, pop music, the south or to anyone looking to be exposed to a world that no longer exists.
Rating:
Summary: A slice of Southern history
Review: This is one of those rare biographies that transcend its subject. The rise of Elvis is fascinating and true Elvis fans will find a wealth of information in the book, but there is also much more to take from this well researched tome. The discussion of the music of Memphis, the sources that influenced Elvis and the rise of rock and roll make this book a terrific addition to anyone's library who is interested in music or the south. The relationship between Presley and his many women is discussed here and so is the complex interaction between him and his family. Perhaps his most interesting relationship is with his manager, Colonel Parker. How that relationship shaped his career certainly makes for an interesting read. The author does as fine a job as I have ever seen of documenting his sources and treating his subject with respect, but not awe. This is one of the best bio's I have ever read. I highly recommend this book to students of Elvis, pop music, the south or to anyone looking to be exposed to a world that no longer exists.
Rating:
Summary: Read it !!!
Review: This is the best book on rock and roll I have ever read.(and I've read a lot of them) It has an excitement that runs through the whole book-and the passages on Elvis dealing with his mother's death are extremely well done. All in all,a most enjoyable book that is well researched,and well written
Rating:
Summary: Well-Researched & Detailed
Review: This is the best source I've seen for the facts, instead of sleaze and innuendo, about The King. Guralnick spent considerable years going to the sources of those who interacted with Elvis, so the book is about as accurate as one can get. I now look forward to reading the companion volume about the "fall". The only complaint I have is I often had difficulty figuring out who was talking. When it seemed Sam was being quoted, it was actually Marion; when I was reading a passage from Vernon, I realized several sentences later it was someone else, etc. This may just be the author's style and it was, in the end, not an insurmountable problem for me.
Rating:
Summary: Absorbing documentary
Review: This volume puts Elvis' life in perspective. He was the right person at the right time. The creation of rock 'n' roll at Sun studios in Memphis was an experimental, yet calculated, event that took off and left no prisoners. Rock 'n' Roll, as we know it, would not have been what it is, for better or worse, without Elvis. He was a musical prodigy that knew what he wanted from his music and tried desperately, especially later, to encompass all of 20th century American music. Yet, we also see the human side--the poor country boy, embarrassed by his lack of education, yet supremely confident in himself and proud of his accomplishments. This book was engrossing and I am currently reading the second volume.
Rating:
Summary: An Icon of His Era And Of All Time
Review: Twenty years after his sudden death and a resulting public adoration that has become a peculiar form of near-sainthood, Elvis Aron Presley remains a complex, contradictory, nebulous character who has been wrongly relegated by self-appointed arbiters of high culture to a dustbin of withering disdain. The first volume of Peter Guralnick's refreshing and well-documented work, "Last Train to Memphis" looks closely at Presley the person as well as the entertainer squarely within the cultural and socioeconomic contexts in which he was brought up and scored his greatest musical successes.
The result is a powerful and insightful chronicle of a man and musician perfectly representative of his time and place in history yet oddly ahead of it in many ways. His ascent from shy Tupelo, Mississippi-born truck driver to a key fixture of contemporary American folklore is a classic example of a fierce working class aspiration for a better life. Furthermore, Presley's creative blending of a variety of Southern black and poor white musical traditions into a novel sound that shook the world was a triumph of racial integration as well as musical composition, no small feat given the U.S.'s officially sanctioned racial segregation of the mid-1950s. And, along with his innovative manager, Tom Parker, "The Pelvis" permanently transformed the public image of the popular entertainer by skillfully exploiting a then still-new medium called television.
Guralnick's treatise ends with 1958, the year which saw the death of Elvis's doting mother and his Army induction, the two occurrences considered by many to be the beginning of his tragic descent into the glitzy caricature of ham actor, decadent celebrity and portly Vegas lounge act. Perhaps a second volume may put that period into its proper perspective also. However, it may be fitting that Presley's later years and sudden death remain swathed in some controversy and mystery, because it is from that controversy and mystery that his pop cultural enshrinement has come to pass, and deservedly so.
Rating:
Summary: A must read.
Review: When Elvis Presly died I was only two years old. Growing up the only exposure I had to the story of Elvis was from the punchlines of late-night talk shows. I soon dismissed Elvis and his work as corny, out of date music from a past era. "Last Train to Memphis" reveals the error of such thinking by retelling Elvis' story with painstaking detail and accuracy. Peter Guralnick does a superior job in presenting a story that we all "thought" we knew, the story of a true American original.
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