A New Book on Elvis and the Colonel

The story of Elvis Presley is the story of America in the last half of the 20th century, so explosively improbable that we can still barely make sense of it a quarter of the way through the 21st. You can assign Elvis either blame or credit for opening the ears of white listeners to Black American music, but there’s no question that he busted the doors wide open. As Americans, we are who we are at least partly because of him. We may be mixed up, messed up, occasionally at one another’s throats—but still, we seek accord through the salvation of a chord. The story of Elvis’ rise and fall hasn’t faded from the public imagination, proving irresistible to filmmakers like Sofia Coppola and Baz Luhrmann . If anything, in an era when algorithms seek to determine our taste—and, increasingly,