Madonna
A Rebel Life
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Narrated by:
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Elise Arsenault
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Written by:
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Mary Gabriel
About this listen
In this riveting biography, award-winning author Mary Gabriel chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the greatest female pop icon of the modern era: Madonna.
With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion—as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles—taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held a Madonna lookalike contest featuring Andy Warhol as a judge, and opened a department called “Madonna-land.”
But Madonna was more than just a pop star. Everywhere, fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could shed the buttoned-down demeanor of the 1970s and feel relevant to a new generation. Amid the scourge of AIDS, she brought queer identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever—and be whoever—they wanted. Despite fierce criticism, she never separated her music from her political activism. And, as an artist, she never stopped experimenting. Madonna existed to push past boundaries by creating provocative, visionary music, videos, films, and live performances that changed culture globally.
Deftly tracing Madonna’s story from her Michigan roots to her rise to super-stardom, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the dramatic life and achievements of one of the greatest artists of our time.
©2023 Mary Gabriel (P)2023 Little, Brown & CompanyWhat the critics say
"A gorgeous and unsettling narrative...Ninth Street Women is supremely gratifying, generous, and lush but also tough and precise -- in other words, as complicated and capacious as the lives it depicts...It's as if once Gabriel got started, the canvas before her opened up new vistas. We should be grateful she yielded to its possibilities."—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"Ninth Street Women is like a great, sprawling Russian novel, filled with memorable characters and sharply etched scenes. It's no mean feat to breathe life into five very different and very brave women, none of whom gave a whit about conventional mores. But Ms. Gabriel fleshes out her portraits with intimate details, astute analyses of the art and good old-fashioned storytelling."—Ann Landi, Wall Street Journal
"Ninth Street Women is a must read...Gabriel seamlessly weaves the intimate and the public, the lives and the art, making us feel we were there...It is a story that is a part of the American story, told here in vivid, meaningful detail, an absolutely pivotal text."—Margaret Randall, Women's Review of Books
What listeners say about Madonna
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tara Braden
- 2023-10-31
Brilliant… The longest audiobook I have ever enjoyed
I absolutely loved Mary Gabriel’s biography of the life of Madonna. It is an amazingly detailed account of Madonna‘s incredible life and artistry, her generosity, her creativity, and her brilliant performances around the world. Having toured internationally, myself as a musician since my 20s I emphasized with many of her situations even though our music is completely different. I loved her when she played Eva Perón and Andrew Lloyd Webber s Evita, and the fact she discovered so many unknown producers and gave them a chance to shine. The fact that she performed so often pushing through pain is even more admirable. I found her life and the battles she fought for women and minorities remarkable and inspiring. Madonna I love you and Mary thank you for writing this book. I speak Spanish and French, and found some of the
pronunciations incorrect, but apart from that, the production was excellent I hope it does well!
Liona Boyd ❤️🎸
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- SuperNova
- 2024-05-29
THE AUTHOR is a TRUMP HATING BASHER.
And Madonna is only a rebel and "brave" while picking on Christianity but she has no balls to speak out against ISLAM and their hatred for gays. the next time she wants to be ballsy I want her to incorporate Islam holy images while gyrating on them. That would be brave. I don't agree with bashing no religion but I'm just stating a point that she is a hypocrite.
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- Sebastian Stoker
- 2024-08-19
A Book for Stans, and Nothing More
This is just a fan book, a puff piece, a PR job. I couldn’t finish listening. So boring. Madonna is such a complex character, one of the three American super-famous narcissists who rose to fame and power at the end of the 20th century (Donald Trump and Oprah are the other two) so it is quite absurd that anyone would write something that ignores Madge’s Shakespearean flaws, and desperately tries to paint her as an unimpeachable heroine. And to be clear, I like Madonna very much, but I find her so interesting because she is talented and ambitious, while also striving for something meaningful, AND also megalomaniacal. Why, for example, would anyone write a bio of Ernest Hemingway and try to portray him as a great writer and just a good dude??? Madonna IS a feminist icon of the post-modern era, arguably THE feminist icon. So why not present her as the amazingly, sometimes troublingly, conflicted character she is?
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