Madonna

A comprehensive biography of the pop phenomenon and queen of reinvention. Life is a mystery—hers shouldn't be after reading this.

In this exceptional biography, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Gabriel chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the greatest female pop icon of the modern era: Madonna. Daring to write a biography of a woman with whom the entire world is on a first-name basis, Gabriel has created a book that is neither gossip-driven nor overly critical. Instead, she reveals a Madonna who is both more genuine and more astonishingly believable; a rock-and-roll suffragette.

With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated an explosion comparable to that of Elvis or the Beatles, taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. But Madonna was more than just a pop star. Fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could shed the conservative demeanor of the 1970s and resonate with a new generation. Amid the AIDS crisis, she brought queer identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever and be whoever they wanted. Despite facing fierce criticism, she never separated her music from her political activism and continually pushed boundaries through her provocative, visionary music, videos, films, and live performances that changed culture globally.

Master biographer Mary Gabriel deftly traces Madonna's story from her Michigan roots to her rise to superstardom.