Graceland: Going Home with Elvis

My son brought this book home as part of a school project and I absentmindedly picked it up and started reading. It really hooked me from the start and I ended up reading it cover to cover in just a couple of days.The author has a great way of meandering from subject to subject so that the book encompasses much more than just facts about Graceland. It studies how the houses that we live in represent where we have come from and where we are going, not just as individuals but as a culture and a country. The book also looks honestly at Elvis Presley's life, without wallowing in the uglier aspects of his life and death.

Elvis was the unique product of a very specific time and place; a cultural expression of that sweaty, hardscrabble slice of Mississippi River Delta biracial culture which has produced so much of the authentic in American music. The singer's unusual and deep attachment to his context is well understood in this perceptive biography, whose author views and interprets Presley through his homes, from the shotgun shack in East Tupelo to the "Peckerwood Palace" of Graceland. Highly readable and of value to students of contemporary American culture, but committed Elvis fans will not be comforted by this unblinking examination of the King and his world. (The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)

Truly great book on the myth of Elvis Presley and also about the history of the past in the United States. We can understand in a better way what Graceland truly mean to Elvis... A superficial time-line concerning his life is also a great source of informations about the man behind the star... Edith Robitaille from Quebec, Canada.