Elizabeth

Whatever the final autopsy results reveal, it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the planned concert series at London's 02 Arena in July 2009. These shows would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but he could never have completed them, not mentally, and not physically. Michael knew it and his advisors knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. Why did it happen this way? After an intense five year investigation, New York Times bestselling author Ian Halperin uncovers the real story of Michael Jackson's final years, a suspenseful and surprising thriller.

Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work—first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying.

In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.

Even as she rose to fame as a cast member of the hit television shows Ally McBeal and Arrested Development, Portia alternately starved herself and binged, all the while terrified that the truth of her sexuality would be exposed in the tabloids. She reveals the heartache and fear that accompany a life lived in the closet, a sense of isolation that was only magnified by her unrelenting desire to be ever thinner. With the storytelling skills of a great novelist and the eye for detail of a poet, Portia makes transparent as never before the behaviors and emotions of someone living with an eating disorder.

From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to a life of health and honesty, falling in love with and eventually marrying Ellen DeGeneres, and emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.

Megastar. Lover. Mother. Opportunist. Chameleon. Role model.

She's all of these things...and more.

Yet, who is she, really?

In Madonna: An Intimate Biography, author J. Randy Taraborrelli's scrupulously researched and completely balanced unauthorized biography of one of the world's most celebrated entertainers, the reader is allowed to draw his or her own conclusions. Indeed, the portrait bestselling author Taraborrelli paints here is of a truly complex woman, one who is driven and determined to succeed at any cost, yet who displays remarkable vulnerability when it comes to matters of the heart.

It is significant that Madonna: An Intimate Biography is the first such book written about the star in over a decade, because in the past ten years the ever-changing Madonna has gone through her biggest transformation yet -- from tempestuous sex goddess to happily married mother. Amazingly, as she launches her first worldwide tour in eight years, she is now -- at forty-something -- enjoying one of the most successful periods of her groundbreaking career.

Whereas other books about Madonna have been based on previously published material, Madonna: An Intimate Biography is the result of ten years of exclusive interviews with people who are speaking publicly about her for the first time, including close friends, business associates and even family members. Since Taraborrelli interviewed the star herself early in her career, he is now able to draw from such firsthand experiences to place her success story in perspective and provide new, stunning insights. The true Madonna, as presented here, is not merely a sensation-seeking tabloid vixen, but a flesh-and-blood woman with human foibles and weaknesses -- as well as great strengths and ambitions.

For the first time, the reader learns about the complex nature of her difficult relationship with her father, and how the two finally found one another after years of estrangement; how Warren Beatty broke her heart, and why the two never wed; how she and John Kennedy, Jr., became romantically involved, his mother's reaction to the prospect of Madonna as a daughter-in-law and why it could never have worked out; the truth of her relationships with the fathers of her two children and how, as a loving and attentive mother, she has evolved into a surprisingly different woman...and what the future holds for her.