Madonna Like an Icon
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Madonna is the biggest female pop star in the world yet there is no serious biography of her, and no biography at all by a woman. Existing books are either gossipy style manuals or rehashes of press cuttings and they all end in 2001 with Madonna's marriage to Guy Ritchie. Yet her story hardly ends there, as evinced by her two record-breaking world tours since then ... Lucy O'Brien's extensive and well-researched biography looks at Madonna the artist, giving detailed analysis of her music, complete with revealing interviews with musicians and producers. It focuses on her cultural impact and the way she uses cinema, photography, visual art, theatre and dance in her work. It takes an in-depth look at how - and, more to the point, why - Madonna has reinvented herself through her twenties, thirties, forties, and will no doubt do so again in her fifties.
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As a Madonna fan, I read J. Randy Taraborrelli's Madonna: An Intimate Biography and loved it. Sensational, trashy and in bite size pieces, I devoured chapters at a time.
O'Brien's biography of Madonna is completely different to Taraborrelli's. Her work seems more academic in it's written style, and as a former university student this is apparent when you read that O'Brien is an academic herself. And the opening chapters tell us of her own personal fascination with Madonna as opposed to Taraborrelli's journalistic endeavours.
The biography itself charters Madonna's life up to present times, from her beginnings to the then settled adoption saga of David Banda. If you're a Madonna fan this will all be pretty familiar.
A biographer should not be afraid to critique their subject and this aspect is what made the book for me. O'Brien took a step back from the fly on the wall documentation used by Taraborrelli and psychoanalysed and critiqued Madonna, what made her the person she is now, and possibly where she is going next.
A thoroughly modern and mature read about Madonna.
