Music scholar Peter Guralnick chose with care the title of the second half of his immense (and immensely important) Elvis biography. The first half, 1994's Last Train To Memphis, had as its central figure a somewhat cryptic Elvis Presley, and concerned itself equally with the environment of 1950s Memphis that allowed such an unexpected mixture of musical styles to come bubbling up through him. In Careless Love, Guralnick offers up an all-too-human protagonist who placed his faith too easily in sycophants and charlatans, bad movies and cheap spirituality, gutless music, too-young girls, and pills, pills, pills. But instead of turning the second act of his subject's life into a sensationalized spectacle like so many Elvis biographies—a sort of Elvis: The Tacky Years—Guralnick takes Presley's descent seriously. A careful, tasteful writer, he portrays Presley's later years as a tragedy brought about by a long series of bad choices. In creating his portrait of an inquisitive, boundlessly talented man too easily led by those around him, Guralnick includes plenty of telling moments. In one instance, Presley, intrigued by the editing process for one of his films, tries to talk with the director about it until he's pulled away by his bored, goldbricking entourage. It beautifully illustrates in miniature what went wrong, how the talent got squandered. The de-emphasis on music played another part, with the glowing exception of a short-lived, late-'60s comeback: Simply allowing Presley to perform material suited to him briefly catapulted him back to music's forefront before manager-for-life Tom Parker found new ways to profit from it quickly, easily, and in a way that it might as well have been designed to destroy his client. By riding a downward-bound drug- and occult-fueled train into what can only be called madness, Presley found plenty of ways to destroy himself, as well, and Guralnick doesn't allow his affection for his subject to prevent him from revealing plenty of embarrassing details. Voyeurs will find much to pique their interest. There's Scamper the chimpanzee, for one thing, as well as Presley's proposal to make and star in an early-'70s karate movie. But, kitsch and all, Guralnick's book emanates a profound sadness. It's an American tragedy involving the man Guralnick views as the very embodiment of an America of a certain time. It's also a stunning piece of scholarship that completes the exemplary biography its predecessor began, not just detailing what happened, but going a long way toward explaining why.