Madonna

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