Nov 12, 2025 5:00 AM PT
The Colonel and the King
by Peter Guralnick
Elvis Presley has been gone for 48 years now, but he hasn’t really died. The second half of the 20th century took shape around his almost mystical youthful charisma, and later around his ghost. But Elvis wouldn’t have been Elvis without Colonel Tom Parker, the Dutch-born entrepreneur who managed Presley’s career from 1955 until 1976, just one year before the performer’s death. Peter Guralnick has already given us the definitive Elvis biography with his two-volume classic, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, published in the ’90s. Consider The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World—a sympathetic, surprising, and assiduously researched book—a coda to that essential work. Parker was a shrewd wheeler-dealer, a flimflammer of the highest order; he’s commonly seen as a villain in Elvis’ story. But Guralnick argues, convincingly, that Parker’s role was more complex than that. These are two men whose fates were entwined. To love one of them also means reckoning with the truth of the other. —Stephanie Zacharek
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