Reviews for Elvis, the #1 Hits: The Secret History of the Classics

The average rating for Elvis, the #1 Hits: The Secret History of the Classics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-14 00:00:00 Sherry Smith This is essentially a work of journalism; indeed, at one point, Ms. Nadelson uses the noun phrase "another journalist" as an appositive when describing an acquaintance. The problem here may well be mine, but on the other hand, it is true that one of the cardinal sins of journalism is to insert oneself into the story, which Ms. Nadelson has done here--smugly at times. There are of course exceptions to this--David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes to mind--but this isn't one of them. Part of that stems from the fact that Ms. Nadelson isn't particularly interesting, doesn't write particularly well, and appears, given the text of the book, too lazy to conduct real research. Dean Reed's story is interesting, and there are other books out there about him that I have to believe are better-researched and written than this one.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-25 00:00:00 Gregory Miller Dean Reed, born in Colorado in 1938. Did he just want to be a music superstar, so much that he went to East Berlin and the Soviet Union in the 1960s (a place where he was a celebrity, a big fish in a small pond)? Was he a CIA mole (one hears that they like outlandish people as spies)? Did he die under mysterious circumstances in the. 1980s? A very well written book, really a memoir of the American author travelling to the East in the late 1980s (before the wall fell) to research the strange life of Dean Reed.