CMT.com Click here

Bankrate.com Click here

The Fort Worth Star Telegram Click here

The Washington Post Click here

Today's Newsday Click here

Ear Candy Website Click here

The Long Island Press Click here

The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom) review, Click here

The New York Review of Books Click here

The Seattle Times' review Click here

The Louisville Courier-Journal's review of The Colonel. Click here

The New York Daily News' review Click here

Variety article that talks about The Colonel  and Hollywood by clicking here.

Los Angeles City Beat. Click here

The alt.elvis.king newsgroup Click here.

The Elvis Information Network Click here

You may download and read this article in a PDF Format by clicking here. Click once on the link and since this is a large file, please be patient as it downloads.

Get a free copy of Adobe Reader by clicking this graphic.

The Kansas City Star's  book review Click here

Tennessean.com book review Click here

Nashville City Paper review Click here

Pam Beach Post review Click here

Publisher's Weekly review of THE COLONEL: The Extraordinary Story of
Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley

Nash, a feature writer for Entertainment Weekly and author of such books as Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, offers an unusual portrait of Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's infamous manager. Her narrative of Parker' s bizarre life, from his childhood in Holland and illegal entry into the U.S. to his rise from carny to household name, reads more like fiction. In fact, with a main character who changes his identity to hide his mysterious (and possibly murderous) past and who cultivates relationships with both shady mob characters and America's elite (e.g. Lyndon Johnson) in an attempt to capture the money, power and respect he never had as a youngster, Nash's biography seems only comparable to the fictional life of Jay Gatsby. And Nash's book, thanks to Presley's untimely death, does not have a happy ending. Despite how easy it would be to shred Parker for Presley's demise, Nash, who interviewed Parker as well as his friends and enemies, is careful to portray both the tyrannical and philanthropic sides of Parker's eccentric personality. Nash uses her careful and extensive research to fill in the blanks in Parker's past and presents viable reasons for his unexplainable behavior, including his refusal to allow Presley to tour outside the U.S. and his laissez-faire attitude toward Presley's drug addiction. Using the cunning of a detective and the straightforward prose of a journalist, Nash, to the delight of Elvis lovers everywhere, answers some lingering questions while posing a few new ones about the man who made the King and then stole his crown. (July) - Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 

Kirkus Reviews review of THE COLONEL: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley

Colonel Parker: con man, impresario, criminal-though perhaps best summed up by his military discharge report, "Psychosis, Psychogenic Depression, acute, on basis of Constitutional Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability." Journalist Nash (Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, not reviewed, etc.), who makes heroic attempts at an even hand-"the Colonel was all the things he appeared to be, both good and bad"- nonetheless has a difficult time fleshing out the former. What he was good at was making sure he got a whopping share of his clients' money. Otherwise, he was a mighty unsavory character, starting with the author's conjecture that he was involved in a murder back in Holland, which caused him to flee to the US. He became the arch carnival man before transferring his overbearing sales talents to music promotion, representing Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, and Hank Snow, and then taking on Elvis as his cottage industry. Nash suggests Parker "single-handedly took the carnival tradition first to rock and roll, and then to modern mass entertainment... by merely applying the exploitational tactics of the barker to his own client, he drew a straight line from the bally platform....to the hullabalooed concert stage." He was also a paranoid controller with a need to diminish and degrade, a man who mulcted his client with an absurd 50% commission rate (and no cut in the peripheral sales), and who drove Elvis mercilessly to perform, brushing off the performer's panic attacks and fears that led to his drug abuse, as well as his obvious physical and emotional decline. Yes, as a Parker crony said, "Nobody killed Elvis except Elvis," but with friends like Parker, who needs an executioner? A smoothly detailed study of one shady man-an exploiter and murder suspect who drove his meal ticket to the grave-and not even praiseworthy for his business acumen.

From issue #67 of ELVIS WORLD magazine:

Also to be released at that time (July) is Alanna Nash's The Colonel (The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley). Nash earlier penned Alan Fortas' Elvis book, as well as Revelations of the Memphis Mafia, one of the most revealing Elvis books ever to see print.

Almost 10 years of research on Parker have taken Nash all across the USA many times (how we'd love to have her Frequent Flyer miles!) and even to Breda, in the Netherlands, where she spent a week with Parker's family and dug into government archives long forgotten in her search for the facts about one of the most controversial figures in Elvis' life. Some of her
findings may shock Elvis fans, whose opinions of Parker vary widely.

Book Review: “The Colonel”
Author: Alanna Nash
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Reviewer: Ken Vrana

Three years ago, I had little if any real interest in Elvis Presley. All that would change when an old girlfriend of his suggested I do a documentary film on the man. Now, after traveling over 150,000 miles and doing some 400 interviews, I jokingly tell people I can probably tell you what color socks the guard at Graceland wore in 1965. In part, that’s why I was particularly interested in reading Alanna Nash’s newest book, “The Colonel. – The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley.”

It’s no secret that Elvis’ lifelong manager, Colonel Tom Parker has been the target or ridicule and scorn by the legions of Elvis fans who believed that Parker bilked Elvis at every turn, so of course, the path of least resistance would have been to simply jump on that band wagon and enjoy the ride. Never one to take the easy route however, Alanna Nash has produced a thoroughly readable and hugely well-researched book that will both entertain and illuminate it’s readers.

“The Colonel” is about 416 pages long, but Nash moves us from Parker’s life as a boy in Holland, where he was actually born, Andreas van Kuijk, through his flight from that native land and subsequent years on the carnival and circus circuits, to his discovery of Elvis and their extended relationship, so effortlessly, that the book feels only half that long. Research is the key to a book like this and given that Tom Parker could have taught the Secret Service a thing or two about how to cover it’s tracks, ferreting out the truth about the man seems a near impossibility. Nash has clearly been able to do it however, in part through sheer doggedness and also by interviewing as many people who actually knew the man as she could find. As I had interviewed many of the same people for my film, I can tell you she did her homework. Moreover, Nash never takes advantage of the cheap shot and I personally know of at least one story she could have included in the book, that she decided not to use, even though it might have enhanced the sizzle factor a notch, because of her commitment to her craft.

The other danger, especially when writing a book that in this case has a built-in potential readership, is that there’s no margin for error. If you’ve not done due diligence, Elvis fans will point it out and I was hard pressed to find any holes in the book. I was also reasonably sure that the potential market for this book reaches beyond Elvis fans. While they will find it fascinating, because of the Elvis connection, it is also a book about a larger than life character, who in many ways helped invent what we now accept as standard talent marketing principals, well before most folks had even thought there was such a thing.

It might easily be said that if Col. Tom Parker had orchestrated the Water Gate Break In, the Plumbers would not have been caught, but if Alanna Nash had written the book about it, she’d have figured out who Deep Throat was, three weeks after it happened. Elvis may well have left the building, but thanks to Nash, Parker never made it passed the door.

2003/06/01 Ken Vrana / Ep.Gold.Com.

Holly Gleason's Yummy List
6 July 2003
The Big Boom Independence Special Edition
 

The Colonel -- Alanna Nash Exhaustively researched, beautifully written and ultimately delivered with unflinching love of a good story, my dear friend Alanna Nash gets to the real crux of the Elvis Presley story: Colonel Tom Parker. Part carnie, part huckster, part scoundrel, part intellectual shark who never slept -- this is the story of how his psyche was forged, how he walked through the world and all the places he went along the way to making Elvis Presley the -- Madonna be damned -- biggest star in the world. It is a realm rife with questionable everything, and it becomes much clearer once Nash starts disassembling. Well-told as a tale if one cares not for the legacy of Graceland, a riveting read if pop culture or black velvet paintings are what fires your desire.