The facts of Parker's early life, as a shiftless carnival hanger-on and boatman in Holland, as an illegal immigrant into the States, and later as a fully-fledged huckster on the Southern carnival circuit, are marshalled to present a convincing psychological portrait of a man whose management style was forged by his small-time successes, scams and frauds as a carny, and who would never outgrow the limitations of his carny mentality even when gifted the most enduringly popular entertainer of the 20th Century as a client. The Colonel's management philosophy was built around two axioms: first, that the world was full of suckers just begging to be parted from their money; and second, that any scam designed to pull the suckers in had a limited shelf-life and, therefore, should be exploited ruthlessly for as much short-term gain as possible.

The book goes on to explore the baleful consequences of this philosophy. If Elvis was just another gimmick, a freakshow to lure the punters, then the trick was to work him for as much up-front money as possible until his appeal ran out. Commencing with the grossly one-sided contract which the Colonel made with the 20-year old Elvis, the authors cite example after example to demonstrate that, throughout Elvis's career, the Colonel's main concern was not his boy's wellbeing, certainly not his artistic development, and in the last analysis not even his financial security. The long-term contracts – with RCA, Hill & Range Publishing, Paramount Studios, the Las Vegas Hilton, and so on – while on the face of them shrewd business, were in reality structured so as to grab whatever cash was on offer, with no thought of renegotiating later on. Each of these deals, while undoubtedly making Elvis (and the Colonel) rich, was a treadmill, a sterile wasteland from an artistic point of view. All undoubtedly contributed to Elvis's growing boredom and reliance on drugs.

One example from the many available will suffice. Why did Elvis produce so much indifferent music after he came out of the Army? A traditional, and somewhat mystical, view is that his rock 'n' roll muse was attenuated or softened by subjection to military discipline, starting with the infamous haircut. In fact, Elvis made lousy records throughout the 60s because he was never offered any decent songs. This state of affairs resulted from a typical piece of Colonel Parker wheeler-dealing over song publishing, wherein aspiring songwriters touting their material for Elvis to sing were told to surrender half their publishing rights or forget it (the usual form of the ultimatum being "Fifty percent of an Elvis Presley hit is a whole lot better than a hundred percent of nothing.") This virtually guaranteed that no good songs would come Elvis's way. But what did it matter to the Colonel that his boy was becoming a laughing-stock in rock circles, when every Elvis recording earned the Colonel a nice royalty? Short-term profit, not long-term credibility, was the Colonel's watchword.

The book's careful scholarship and erudite analysis do not conceal the authors' tone of outrage at the sheer waste of Elvis Presley; and it is difficult to fault their remorseless logic: Parker was, without doubt, an ultimately destructive influence whose greed, laziness and opportunism created many of the conditions which sent Elvis into decline and early death. Here and there, the authors give fascinating contrasts between the career practices of Elvis and those of his near contemporaries such as The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones, which offers a tantalising glimpse of what might have been had Elvis shucked off the Colonel in good time.

However, the mystery remains, after reading this book and many others, why Elvis continued to stick with the Colonel. The petty humiliations, the treadmill-like long-term movie and Vegas contracts, the continuous efforts by Parker to obstruct and kill off any career initiatives which did not conform to his own tapeworm philosophy, all must have made it abundantly clear, even to a drug-addled, sex-glutted, bored-shitless Elvis, that he might be better off under different management. To draw another example from the song-publishing saga, the one time Elvis stood up to the Colonel and recorded a song ("Suspicious Minds") that he wanted to sing, regardless of who owned the publishing rights, he garnered his biggest hit in ages and came up with the defining sound of his latter years.

In fact, the only serious attempt Elvis made to get rid of the Colonel, at the very late stage of 1973, was scuppered by Elvis's own instability, and by the realization that, financially speaking, the Colonel had him by the short hairs. A more determined individual might have pressed ahead, taken the financial hit that separation would have caused, and emerged poorer but happier. Somehow, though, Elvis lacked the necessary steel to look out for his own best interests. The authors put this failing down to a "basic schizophrenia" – the dichotomy between the wild, sexually charged rocker and the nervous, mother-dominated, eager-to-please boy - which saddled Elvis with a mass of chronic insecurities that the Colonel immediately latched onto and exploited.  Although, as the authors point out, each man is the author of his own destiny, and nobody put a gun to Elvis's head and forced him to sign up with Parker, it was Elvis's great misfortune to fall into the clutches of a determined and ruthless predator who knew just how to push his  buttons.  It was Elvis's destiny never to rid himself of the Colonel, and after his abortive insurrection in 1973 the show would grind on for another four years and culminate on the floor of the bathroom at Graceland.