A fastidious biographer with a habitual disregard for hyperboleIn The Colonel And The King, Peter Guralnick – the great chronicler of the life of Elvis Presley – tells a tale about the 80th birthday party of Colonel Tom Parker. “It reminded me of my circus days when I floated on top of an elephant,” he wrote. The tale would include yarns reaching back into Parker’s “dog-catching Day’s and Circus and Carnival work” [sic]. The truth is that Tom Parker wasn’t a Colonel, or a Parker, or a Tom. Guralnick portrays Parker as a manager who understood how to apply the rules of the carnival to the chaos of pop culture.