Becoming Beyoncé
The Untold Story
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first comprehensive biography ever published about America's favorite living pop icon, Beyonce, from New York Times bestselling biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli.
Beyonce Knowles is a woman who began her career at the age of eight performing in pageant shows and talent contests, honing her craft through her teenage years until, at the age of 16, she had her first number one record with Destiny's Child. That hit-making trio launched Beyonce's successful solo career, catapulting her, as of 2014, to #1 on Forbes annual list of most wealthy celebrities--the same year she made the cover of Time. Becoming Beyonce is not only the story of struggle, sacrifice, and what it takes to make it in the cut-throat record industry, it's the story of the great rewards of such success and the devastating toll it often takes on the human spirit.
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.
