Madonna: A Rebel Life - The Biography

(Paperback)

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In this riveting and immersive biography, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel details the meteoric rise and enduring influence of perhaps the greatest pop icon of the modern era: 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 world by storm with her liberated politics and breath-taking 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 held a Madonna lookalike contest with Andy Warhol as judge, and opened a department called "Madonna-land".

Everywhere, women and men gravitated to the singer and actor as an emblem of a new age, one in which the women's liberation could shed the buttoned-down demeanour and reserved seriousness of the '60s and '70s and continue to make tremendous strides for a new generation. Topping charts again and again with provocative, visionary music and videos, Madonna brought queer and sexually-curious identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever, and the space to be who they wanted.

Now, after almost 45 years in the spotlight, and in her 65th year, no stranger to controversy, Madonna stands as one of the staunchest supporters of women's and LGBTQ+ rights and continues to represent a lionized emblem of liberation throughout the world.

Deftly tracing the artist's life and influence from her Michigan roots through to her sold out concerts around the globe, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the inspiration, fame, and activism of one of the greatest music icons of our time.

Author Bio

Mary Gabriel is the author of Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art; Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored; and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and lives in Ireland.