The Colonel

Almost the only indisputable fact about Colonel Tom Parker is that he was the manager of the greatest performer in popular music: Elvis Presley. His real name wasn’t Tom Parker †“ indeed, he wasn’t an American at all, but a Dutch immigrant called Andreas van Kujik. And he certainly wasn’t a proper military colonel: he purchased his title from a man in Louisiana. But while the Colonel has long been acknowledged as something of a charlatan, this book is the first to reveal the extraordinary extent of the secrets he concealed, and the consequences for the career, and ultimately the life, of the star he managed. As Alanna Nash’ prodigious research has discovered, the Colonel left Holland most probably because, at the age of twenty, he bludgeoned a woman to death. Entering the US illegally, he then enlisted in the army as ‘Tom Parker’. But, with supreme irony for someone later styling himself as Colonel, Parker’s military career ended in desertion, and discharge after a psychiatrist had certified him as a psychopath. He then became a fairground barker, working sideshows with a zeal for small-scale huckstering and the casual scam that never left him. And by the height of Elvis’s success, Parker had become a pathological gambler who, at the same time as he was taking, amazingly, a full 50% of Presley’s earnings, frittered away all his wealth in the casinos of Las Vegas. As Nash shows, therefore, the often baffling trajectory of Elvis Presley’s career makes perfect sense once the secret imperatives of the Colonel’s life are known. Parker never booked Presley for a tour of Europe because of the dark secret that ensured he himself could never return there. Even at his most famous, Elvis was still being booked to play out-of-the-way towns in North Carolina †“ because the former fairground barker (who shamelessly negotiated as such even with top record company and film executives) knew them from his days on the circus circuit. And Elvis was trapped playing years of arduous seasons in Las Vegas †“ two shows nightly, seven days a week, until boredom and despair brought on the excessive drug use that killed him †“ because for Parker he was “an open chit†? whose huge earnings prevented his manager’s losses at the gambling tables being called in. Alanna Nash knew Parker towards the end of his life, and has now uncovered the whole story, improbable, shocking, and never less than compelling, of how this larger-than-life man made, and then unmade, popular music’s first and greatest superstar.

A pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house the Colonel is immersed in thought. Memories are storming in. Memories of his wife. Memories of the great patriots of the past, all of them assassinated or executed. Memories of his children, who had joined the different factions of the 1979 revolution. There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his youngest daughter and bury her before sunrise. The Islamic Revolution, like every other revolution in history, is devouring its own children. And whose fault is that? This shocking diatribe against the failures of the Iranian left over the last fifty years does not leave one taboo unbroken.

“I’ll take my share of the blame. I only ask that he take his.” In Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard brought the man—and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality—to trial. And, surprisingly, she won. Pollard and the married Colonel Breckinridge began their decade-long affair when she was just a teenager. After the death of his wife, Breckinridge asked for Pollard’s hand—and then broke off the engagement to marry another woman. But Pollard struck back, suing Breckinridge for breach of promise in a shockingly public trial. With premarital sex considered irredeemably ruinous for a woman, Pollard was asserting the unthinkable: that the sexual morality of men and women should be judged equally. Nearly 125 years after the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal, America is still obsessed with women’s sexual morality. And in the age of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, we’ve witnessed fraught public reckonings with a type of sexual exploitation unnervingly similar to that experienced by Pollard. Using newspaper articles, personal journals, previously unpublished autobiographies, and letters, Bringing Down the Colonel tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back.

In The Colonel, Alanna Nash, the author of Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch, explores in depth the amazing story of Colonel Tom Parker, the man behind the legend and the myth of Elvis Presley. The result is a book that reads like the most riveting of real-life detective stories -- one that will completely change your view of Presley's life, success, and death. While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley, this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom Parker written by someone who knew him personally. And for anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the greatest and most influential of the twentieth century, it is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker, the man who virtually controlled Elvis's every move. Alanna Nash has been covering the story of Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker since the day of Presley's funeral in Memphis, Tennessee. She was the first journalist allowed to view Presley's body, a compelling and surprising sight. But the profile of Parker attending the funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap was even stranger, and led her to investigate the man behind the myth. It has been known for twenty years that Thomas Andrew Parker was, in fact, born in Holland as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. But Nash has dug much deeper and, in a masterpiece of reporting, unearthed never-before-seen documents, including Parker's army records and psychiatric evaluations, and the original police report of an unsolved murder case in Holland that lies at the heart of the Parker mystery. In the process of weighing the evidence, she answers the biggest riddle in the history of the music industry, as it becomes clear that every move Parker made in the handling of Elvis Presley -- from why he never allowed Elvis to perform in Europe, to why he didn't halt Elvis's drug use, to why he put him in so many mediocre movies, and even the Colonel's direction of Presley's army career -- was designed to protect Parker's own secrets. Filled with startling new material, her book challenges even the most familiar precepts of the Presley saga -- everything we presumed about Parker's handling of the world's most famous entertainer must now be reevaluated in the light of information Nash reveals about Parker, who cared little for Presley beyond what the singer could do to bolster the Colonel's precarious position as an illegal alien. Elvis Presley, as one of Parker's unwitting victims, paid a major price for the Colonel's past and his overwhelming need to be more important than his client. As a result, Presley was never allowed to reach his potential and died in drug-induced frustration over his stunted and mismanaged career. In this astonishing, impeccably written, and vastly entertaining book, Nash proves that the only figure in American popular culture as fascinating as Elvis Presley is Colonel Tom Parker, the man who shaped Elvis, who in turn helped shape us.

Who was the man behind Elvis? He claimed to be a West Virginia native called Colonel Tom Parker, who in fact was an illegal immigrant from Holland. Here is the shocking, true story of the man who created, exploited, and some say, destroyed Elvis Presley. 16 pages of photos, many never before published.

Colonel Keaton is in trouble. His wife has retreated into a virtual heaven and his son remains missing after joining an extrasolar mission to track down an alien race. He is presently tasked by his superiors with the threat assessment of hived human intelligences, one of which successfully attacks a compound under his watch. Now, one of the strongest hive minds in the world approaches Keaton with an offer that could completely change his world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

An election day massacre in colonial Martinique. A "mad" artist who lives in a cave. A satirical wooden bust of a white colonel. The artist's banishment to the Devil's Island penal colony for "impertinence." And a young anthropologist who arrives in Martinique in 1962, on the eve of massive modernization. In a stunning combination of scholarship and storytelling, the award-winning anthropologist Richard Price draws on long-term ethnography, archival documents, cinema and street theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how one generation's powerful historical metaphors could so quickly become the next generation's trivial pursuit, how memories of oppression, inequality, and struggle could so easily become replaced by nostalgia, complicity, and celebration. "A superb callaloo of a book. . . . Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the postcolonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity."--George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile "By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price's research is more fascinating than a piece of fiction."--Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem "Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres, and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes."--Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past "Filled with insights that are at once theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic, The Convict and the Colonel is required reading for anyone interested in colonialism, memory, and contemporary Caribbean societies."--Jennifer Cole, American Ethnologist

An insider’s view of Libya’s fallen dictator by the woman who served as his longtime troubleshooter and confidante. For almost half of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year reign, Daad Sharab was his trusted confidante—the only outsider to be admitted to his inner circle. Down the years many have written about Gaddafi, but none have been so close. Now, years after the violent death of “the Colonel,” she gives a unique insight into the character of a man of many contradictions: tyrant, hero, terrorist, freedom fighter, womanizer, father figure. Her account is packed with fascinating anecdotes and revelations that show Gaddafi in a surprising new light. Daad witnessed the ruthlessness of a flawed leader who is blamed for ordering the Lockerbie bombing, and she became the go-between for the only man convicted of the atrocity. She does not seek to sugar-coat Gaddafi’s legacy, preferring readers to judge for themselves, but also observed a hidden, more humane side. The leader was a troubled father and compassionate statesman who kept sight of his humble Bedouin roots, and was capable of great acts of generosity. The author also pulls no punches about how Western politicians such as Tony Blair, George Bush, and Hillary Clinton shamelessly wooed his oil-rich regime. Despite her warnings the dictator was ultimately consumed by megalomania, and Daad was caught up in his dramatic fall. Falsely accused by Gaddafi’s notorious secret service of being both the Colonel’s mistress and a spy, she faced betrayal and imprisonment—and, caught up in the Arab Spring uprising, she also faced a fight for her life as bombs rained down on Libya.