Mary Gabriel’s “Madonna: A Rebel Life” is a meticulously researched, readable account of the most driven and (re)inventive pop star of our times.

Madonna Louise Ciccone’s decadeslong career and global reach has embraced trends in music, fashion and activism, and Gabriel packs an Encyclopedia Madonnica of detail and anecdote into 800 pages, following a proper chronology, bookended by the performer’s sorrow-tinged childhood in suburban Detroit to international elder.

Gabriel pored over archives and interviewed key players, among them Christopher Ciccone, the star’s younger brother and artistic accomplice.

The degree of Madonna’s collaboration remains a mystery here, but Gabriel’s treatment of her protagonist is intimate, with windows onto what Madonna thought at any moment, from the early loss of her mother to her East Village punk brio to those supernova albums of the ’80s and ’90s. At its best, the book is delightful coffee talk, a loosening-up of an icon encrusted by media-induced sangfroid.

So why is “Madonna” disappointing? In fairness, it’s a tall order to re-imagine this most famous and overexposed of celebrities. The prose is often pedestrian, lapsing into the conditional voice. And its newsreel of social ruptures and political events disrupts the narrative flow.

Gabriel indulges in melodrama, too, depicting the star’s unhappy Broadway run in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” as “a storming of the Bastille” and “ordeal,” and portraying Madonna’s marriage to director Guy Ritchie as soap-opera fare.

Gabriel has written a hagiography rather than a biography, worshipful in its tone. And there’s simply too much bloat, too much minutiae of stadium tours and corporate shenanigans. “Madonna” is a work of bland ambition, with one extraordinary achievement: It makes the megastar boring.

Someday the legend will get the feminist biography she deserves, but this ain’t it. — Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Though often lauded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Alfred Hitchcock was also known for having a dark side, including his authoritarian tendencies as a director and sexually inappropriate behavior toward the women in his films. Tippi Hedren, who starred in “The Birds” and “Marnie,” has alleged in recent years that the late director sexually assaulted her and threatened her career after she rejected his advances.

For the famed auteur, women, and actors in general, were props to be controlled and molded with the sole purpose of realizing his vision.

In “Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession,” Laurence Leamer seeks to divert the reader from seeing the female actors through the director’s gaze, constructing instead vignettes that attempt to memorialize these women as more than their captivating beauty.

“Hitchcock’s Blondes” is part biography of the auteur, part crash course into his catalog of movies. But mostly this book is just what it says it is: a survey of the women on whom Hitchcock relied to bring his artistry to life.

Although Leamer betrays a reverence and appreciation for the filmmaker, Hitchcock is very much the complicated antagonist of the story. But Leamer’s warranted efforts to accentuate Hitchcock’s problematic behavior are sometimes executed at the expense of conveying a holistic picture of reality.

Despite occasional references to their narcissism and ambition, Hitchcock’s blondes are often portrayed as wooden innocents with little agency or autonomy — objects at the mercy of the powerful director no matter how hard he pushed them or out of line he became.

Though at times meandering, “Hitchcock’s Blondes” dishes sufficient old Hollywood gossip to keep interested readers entertained. — Krysta Fauria, Associated Press