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List Price: $7.99 | | Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Salesrank: 2387611
Released: July 30, 2002 |
| Our Price: $7.81 |
| Used Price: $0.54 |
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| Media: Mass Market Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
MADONNA! Diva-provocateur! Artist, mogul, and self-promoter par excellence! The most outrageous brilliant, controversial, scandalous, and extraordinary pop superstar of our time...or anytime! No celebrity has ever endured more intense public scrutiny of her personal and professional lives...nor has succeeded in, changing her persona so dramatically--and so often--under its withering gaze. With skill, candor, and remarkable insight, author Barbara Victor now takes us deep inside Madonna's world--her loves and her scandals; her roots, her rise, and her incomparable triumphs--to give us the most complete and revealing portrait to date of the self-styled Material Girl, arguably one of the most influential American entertainers of the past century...and undeniably a phenomenon.
Goddess: Inside Madonna Reviews:
Image of Old Madonna vs New Madonna 
2009-12-09 - Recent devolopments have made the Barbara Victor biography more relevant in its comparison of Madonna's present day wealth and success to her many struggles and controversies of the past. The divorce from Guy Ritchie and the adoption of a boy from Africa to name a few. Madonna seems to have a conflicting dual personality where she wants the respectable clean image of success without keeping the rebel bad girl image that made her so rich. She wants droves of fans to line up for her security screened concerts, but doesn't want the public to remember the stalker serving time in jail for trying to break into her house. She wants people to know she adopted a child from Africa and writes children's stories now, but sort of wants to erase her torn underwear costume and the hit music of Papa Don't Preach and Like a Virgin. Victor journeys backward from Madonna's filming of Evita to events that shaped her life in this bio, ommitting some scandals mentioned here, but including insightful episodes from her childhood and early years not often mentioned in the latest gossip on ET.
A Terrible Bio 
2007-02-28 - I was hoping to obtain in-depth information about Madonna's records, but instead I was exposed to writing that can be found in a typical celebrity gossip magazine. I read numerous times that Madonna lost her mother at a young age. She had a rocky relationship with actor Sean Penn. With the amazingly extensive career that the Queen of Pop has had, you'd think the author could give her writing of Madonna's life a little more pizazz.
The color photos in the book are not that great either. They are mostly of her at premieres in 1999/2000.
I'm sure there are better biographies that were written by people who actually did extensive research and didn't flip through a couple of tabloids.
Designated to Madonna fans 
2006-04-05 - This was one of three major autobiographies that came out in 2001 and 2002 on the Uber-star Madonna. Nothing terribly knew, probing into her past, and recounting her career highlights. Great for every Madonna wanna-bee collection.
AVOID!!!!!!!!!!!
2005-09-02 - This is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read!
Barbara Victor seems to hate Madonna, she constantly insults her in this book. Also, the pictures are weak. There are no pictures of her as a child or anything. And Ms. Victor devotes WAYYYYYYYY too much time to analyzing the religious aspects of Madonna's life.
DO NOT BUY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not such a "Goddess"
2005-07-31 - Thoiugh not the first, best or most intriguing of the groundbreaking female pop stars, Madonna has some sort of hold over the American attention, possibly because she changed her image so often. But don't expect an easy read in Barbara Victor's "Goddess" -- this one is less than divine.
The book opens with Madonna preparing for her role in the musical "Evita," based on the life of Eva Peron. This turned out to be the turning point of Madonna's life: It was in the period when she became pregnant, cleaned up her act somewhat, and made her first (and so far, only) acclaimed movie.
Then it bobs back to the arrive of the immigrant Ciccone family in the United States, the early days of Madonna's parents, and the tragedies that her family never recovered from. From there, it tracks her as she became a struggling dancer, whose sexual dancepop became a massive hit. After a disastrous short marriage, many boyfriends (and girlfriends), a porn book, and an unfortunate movie career, she finally settled down with director Guy Richie to become the not-so-quintessential British wife and mother.
Madonna is a bit of a love-her-or-hate-her person, especially since she has none of the warmth, stability or humour of similar pop stars like Deborah Harry. So it's not surprising that Victor's biography will probably inspire ire or delight in anyone who reads it... assuming they can get through it at all.
There's a strange split in Victor's opinions on Madonna. She compares Madonna to the ancient virgin goddesses (huh?), and excuses much of her behavior. Then she ruthlessly shows Madonna's shallowness, sexual obsessiveness and arrogance. How? By the most damning evidence: her own words. Victor uses interview quotes, video footage, and even a behind-the-scenes special where she openly mocks and humiliates a childhood friend.
There is some interesting information, such as analysis of Madonna's songs and music videos, although Victor (like Madonna herself) focuses way too much on the loss of her mother. And were Victor able to cobble together all this information into a straightforward biography, she might be a pretty good writer.
Unfortunately, Victor is actually a pretty bad writer. There's a lot of meaty information here, but no linear series of events. It's very distracting to jerk the readers from Madonna's toddlerhood to her adult career, sometimes in the same page. But that's what Victor does. Even worse, this choppy biography is laced with endless psychoanalyzation, and a tendency to demonize or beatify people as Madonna sees them, not as they actually are.
Split adoration/disdain and a choppy narrative make "Goddess" a chore rather than a guilty pleasure, as a "scandalous" biography ought to be. Whatever you think of Madonna, this "Goddess" is unholy.
