Becoming Beyonce
The Biography
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
She's adored by millions of fans, writes and performs songs that move and inspire, but Beyonce is truly known by very few. Now highly-acclaimed biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli reveals the woman behind the star. He takes us from a childhood spent performing in talent shows to finding worldwide fame with her band Destiny's Child, managed by her father Matthew. Beyoncé's first solo album, Dangerously in Love, went straight to number one and she has to date released a total of five albums which have sold 75 million copies.
Beyoncé prefers to keep her personal life with husband Jay-Z and daughter Blue Ivy carefully under lock and key. She may be a top performer, fashion idol and business mogul in her own right, but fame has come at personal sacrifice and with private heartbreak. Baed on exhaustive research, including exclusive interviews with those how have played pivotal roles in her life and career, the book reveals the hard-earned lessons 'Queen Bey' has learned about love, life, loyalty and family.
Insightful and entertaining, this is the first authoritative biography of the most famous woman in the world today and a must-have for the 'Bey Hive'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Superstardom is a homespun family enterprise with only minimal dysfunction in this tepid biography of pop singer and actress Beyonc Knowles. Taraborrelli (Michael Jackson) ascribes Beyonc 's success to her preternatural voice, musicality, and stage charisma, all obvious from age 11, as well as the single-minded efforts of her management team: first the amateur impresarios who recruited her for a tweens girl group, then her father, Mathew, who applied his salesman's chops and an inherent business cunning equal to any major-label exec's in order to build her career. Knowles herself seems rather square controlled, tight-lipped, relentlessly focused on success and image so the drama comes from shedding people who don't enhance her success, from a gauche boyfriend, Lyndall Locke, to the Destiny's Child group-mates who want more limelight. The book's magnetic center is Mathew, an ego-maniacal control freak and womanizer who's also a promotional genius, but sister Solange provides a jolt with her famous elevator assault on Beyonce's husband, Jay-Z. Taraborrelli did not interview Knowles and too-often substitutes generic gushing for insight: "She'd quietly gone about separating the parts of her life that felt true and organic from those that felt false and pretentious, and then moved forward committed to personal honesty and integrity." But he paints a revealing picture of the entertainment industry's debt to middle-class strivers. Photos.
