In late 1983, an unfamiliar, high, piercing female voice emerged on American pop radio with increasing and puzzling frequency. Shortly thereafter, a sexually obsessed, self-involved, and irregularly clad young woman writhed on music video screens in homes and in dance clubs in urban areas across the United States imploring "Everybody" to dance her dance of liberation. The intriguing figure with the jarring voice turned out to be a white neo-disco singer who frequented the bohemian enclaves of lower Manhattan during the early 1980s, seemingly just trying to make it in show business. When asked her real ambition, the young woman told a stunned Dick Clark: "To rule the world." Madonna Louise Ciccone meant it. Over the course of the next decade, the self-proclaimed "Boy Toy" fought to dominate every corner of the entertainment world with seductive films, consistently successful music, and disturbingly magnetic public gestures, while at...