Material Girl . . . Immaculate sexpot . . . Superstar . . . Mother . . . Kabbalah enthusiast . . . For three decades she has defied categorization. . . . She remains one of our greatest living pop icons. Here is the groundbreaking biography that finally solves the mystery at the heart of Madonna's chameleonlike existence. Drawing upon scores of candid interviews with producers, musicians, collaborators, lovers, and friends, Lucy O'Brien's Madonna:...

"With her arrival on the pop music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion-as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles or Michael Jackson-taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a shopping mall in California was nicknamed "The Madonna Mall" because it was overrun with "Material Girls." Later that year, the flagship Macy's store in Manhattan...

In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior, a farming community in South Africa's rural Free States, were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sexual relations between blacks and whites on the pretext of avoiding miscegenation. The women were jailed as they awaited trial and their white counterparts were released on bail. In the end, the state withdrew the charges, but the accused women's lives, already complicated, became...

"Billy Boyle, US Army detective and ex-Boston cop, faces his toughest investigation yet: infiltrating enemy lines in France as the Allies invade Normandy. It's late May 1944. Captain Billy Boyle is court-martialed on spurious charges of black market dealings. Stripped of his officer's rank, reduced to private, and sentenced to three months' hard labor, Boyle is given an opportunity: he can avoid his punishment if he goes behind enemy lines to rescue...

"A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amid the city's bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics and seedy cabarets, a chance meeting transforms his life forever. Caught between his desire for freedom and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found"--

"The twenty-four tales in this book are of the most famous lost treasures in America, from a two-foot statue reportedly made entirely of silver (the 'Madonna') and a cache of gold, silver, and jewelry that was rumored to also contain the first Bible in America to seventeen tons of gold its value equal to the treasury of a mid-sized nation buried somewhere in northwestern New Mexico. What makes these tales even more compelling is that none of these...

Even hardcore music fans don't know the name Ron Weisner...but they should. A high-powered manager for over four decades, Ron worked alongside Madonna, Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Gladys Knight, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, and, most notably, Michael Jackson. He saw the King of Pop through his game-changing multi-platinum albums Thriller and Off the Wall. He watched M.J.'s prickly father Joe run roughshod over both his son and industry execs....

Christopher Ciccone's memoir is based on his forty-seven years of growing up and working with his sister Madonna. Through most of Madonna's career, Christopher played an important role in her life: as her backup dancer, her personal assistant, her dresser, her decorator, and her art and tour director.

"Exploring every hit record and every era-defining image, this authoritative illustrated book examines all of Madonna's 13 studio albums in fine detail, placing each within the context of the time in which it was recorded and charting the music's subsequent influence on fashion and popular culture"--Back cover.