: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson Randall Sullivan Grove Press , 2012 - 776 pages , 2012 - Biography & Autobiography 2 Reviews When Michael Jackson passed away on June 25, 2009, millions of fans around the world were shocked. Many of them gathered at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, at the Jackson family homes in Los Angeles and Gary, Indiana, and in cities across the globe to grieve for a star whose music is universally recognized as timeless.



Jackson was the most talented, richest, and most famous pop star on the planet. But the outpouring of emotion that followed his loss was bittersweet. Dogged by scandal for years and undone by his own tendency to trust the wrong people, Jackson had become untouchable in many quarters, which wounded him deeply. Untouchable takes readers into the reality of a Michael Jackson they have never met-a man who, from his childhood under the constant glare of the spotlight to his fall from grace, had always been one and who, in the we of a criminal trial that left him briefly hospitalized and broken in spirit, abandoned Neverland to wander the globe without a home.



Jackson shuttled from Bahrain, where he was the guest of a prince who later ended up suing him, to Ireland, where he lived for a few brief months a quiet domestic life, until his attempts to work on a comeback album brought the paparazzi and shattered his peace. With his return to the United States-to homes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles-his attempt to recapture his wealth and reputation would begin in earnest, with a financial bailout for his massive debt and plans for a series of fifty megaconcerts for which he was rehearsing until his death. The Jackson that emerges in these pages is both naive and deeply cunning, a devoted father whose parenting decisions created international outcry, a shrewd businessman whose failures nearly brought down a megacorporation, and an inveterate narcissist who wanted more than anything a quiet, solitary, normal life.



Randall Sullivan delivers never-before-reported information about Jackson's business dealings, his relationship with his family, and the pedophilia allegations that irreparably marked his reputation and changed him personally, as well as the inside story on the guardianship of his children, the foundations of his estate-whose value has grown dramatically since his death- and whether anyone besides Conrad Murray will be held accountable for his death. Based on exclusive access to inner-circle figures including former attorneys, business partners, managers, as well as advisors to Michael's mother Katherine, the guardian of his children, Untouchable is an intimate, unflinching, deeply human portrait of the life and afterlife of Michael Jackson, a man of uncountable contradictions who continues to reign as the Icing of Pop.