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BOOK REVIEWS / ADVANCE PRAISE

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• "[Graceland] is a meditation on Presley as a cultural phenomenon. Ms. Marling...seeks to understand him by exploring the places where he lived...[She] is at her best tracing the sources of Presley's tastes in acquisition. She knows her way around the Nashville country-music scene, the celebrity mansions of Bel Air, the hipster clothing outlets of Memphis. She evokes role models of conspicuous consumption like Hank Williams and Liberace, who--like Presley--knew they were thumbing their noses at good taste, but did so with more humor. She trolls the home-décor magazines of the 1950s, reminding us of super-length white sofas, the furniture equivalent of a debutante's gloves...Graceland is filled with the rich madness of life...[It] is as pleasing as a new pair of blue suede shoes."
  --Robert Campbell, New York Times Book Review

  "The book is a near-masterpiece. Imaginatively thought and generously felt, Graceland isn't just an essential addition to Elvis literature; it's a shrewd, empathetic meditation on the unexpected dignity that lurks beneath the kitsch surface of middle-class taste...[I]t's Graceland...that inspires Marling's finest work. She cuts through the practiced inanities of the tour guides and their sanitization of all that was revolutionary or horrific about Elvis to imagine a real person living there. No one has ever written about Graceland with the penetrating understanding that Marling shows...She makes its smallness and tackiness, its owner's unquenchable thirst for newness, almost inexpressibly, and never condescendingly, moving."

  --Charles Taylor, Boston Phoenix

  "[I]f Marling's most remarkable achievement in Graceland is to write a book about Elvis that is genuinely illuminating, this is, in part, because she is not a musicologist but an art historian. Her concern is with Presley's visual rather than musical tastes, his role not as iconic stage and film and TV performer but as consumer...I went to Graceland once...There was a logic to the setting: the tawdry grace, the hint of humour, the self-conscious expansiveness that summed up Elvis's own musical appeal. It was as if, to explain where he had got to, he had to show himself (and us) where he had come from. And in understanding this, Marling's Graceland becomes both a disturbing and a moving meditation on American popular culture."

  --Simon Frith, Times Higher Education Supplement

  "Marling's [book] is like a road trip with a smart, funny friend (junk food, driving all night, collecting silly souvenirs)...[It is] a beguiling, original guide [to Graceland] complete with directions, admission prices and detours into Southern literature and culture."

  --Kelleher Jewett, The Nation

  "The liveliest and most intriguing of the new books [on Elvis] is Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, a sometimes funny, often thoughtful rumination on the place of Elvis and his super-kitsch mansion in the American iconography."

  --Linda Deutsch, Los Angeles Times

  "In this brilliant, if highly personal, guide to both the man and his home, Marling explains how the Presley shrine differs from other places of tourist pilgrimage: 'The house if full of things that we all have or used to have, or used to want, or hate.' Though it is easy to scoff at Graceland's decor ('a violent Christmastime-lipstick-cherry-coke-fire-engine-hellfire red') and the Polynesian-theme Jungle Den, Marling insists that Elvis was 'the last great Dixie regionalist', on par with William Faulkner."

  --The Independent [UK]

  "[A] revealing and almost perfect book."

  --Rick Tamble, Nashville Banner

  "[A] masterful entry into Elvisology...Marling constructs a meandering biography out of the domestic theater of Elvis...Marling's scrupulously researched (and also hilarious) cultural analysis recalls that of like-minded heroes Tom Wolfe and Greil Marcus...Graceland: Going Home with Elvis is a brilliant achievement. Elvis, as the saying goes, may have left the building, but the author shows us how we are all now living in Graceland."

  --Michael Tortorello, City Pages

  "[For some fans] Elvis is a sort of rockabilly King Arthur who will someday emerge from his tomb in Southern Avalon. Karal Ann Marling...approaches this rather risible myth in a remarkably graceful and gracious way...[The book is] highly polished, witty, and gently elegiac."

  --Mark Harris, The Weekend Sun (Vancouver)

  "An entertaining book by Karal Ann Marling...a keen observer of contemporary culture...By broadening her scope to include so much of American culture, Marling has cleverly set Elvis up as the ultimate tourist, always on the road and longing to get back home. What makes the trip so compelling is Marling's ability to make his story our story. As readers will discover, the cultural geography of `Elvisness'--alien as it may seem--is ours as well."

  --Edward Gunts, Baltimore Sun

  "This literate cultural study looks at the meaning of home for Elvis and America. From his birth home in Tupelo, Miss., to the becolumned Graceland, the King's rags-to-riches story is told in terms of upward mobility, aka home decor. Marling convincingly argues that in purchasing Graceland, the Presley family bought Tara and everything that `Gone With the Wind' had come to signify."

  --Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold, Chicago Tribune

  "Reading [this book] is like taking a trip with a funny, well-read friend who knows where to find the best little dinners and the kinds of roadside attractions that don't get listed in guidebooks, and who can discourse wittily on their meaning and history."

  --David Nicholson, Washington Post Book World

  "[Marling] takes us on a trip to the geographical places inhabited, visited, and created by the King during the course of his rags-to-riches odyssey...The sounds, smells, look, and feel of each of these locales--then and now--are beautifully evoked, and other symbols of the South, such as Faulkner, are blended into the story...Marling is a superb writer--a raconteur, keen observer, poignant historian, casual analyst, and friend."

  --Library Journal

  "Readers [of Graceland] not only experience the American landscape as Presley did--they get a sense of the other influences of the time. Reading this book means meeting William Faulkner, eating moon pies and catfish with cornmeal crust and going backstage at Elvis's awkward wedding to Priscilla. In the process, one comes to understand how the nation grew up with the King, and then grew away from him. Marling obviously poured extensive research into her book. Her riffs and rants have a fun, freewheeling bent, creating cultural linkages that make perfect sense in some moments."

  --Publishers Weekly

  "An unhurried voyage into the dark heart of Elvisland. Whether she is examining a Beale Street portrait studio where Elvis had a glamour short taken while in high school, or taking us into Graceland's Jungle Room, Marling has a wonderful eye for detail and a sharp sense of what these details mean."

  --David Futrelle, In These Times

Karal Ann Marling is Professor of Art History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her many books include George Washington Slept Here, Iwo Jima, and As Seen on TV, all published by Harvard.

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Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Illustrations: Karal Ann Marling

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