David Looseley's study of one of the enduring icons of 20th-century French popular culture is not simply a biography: there have been many of these, including two by the subject herself. As his subtitle implies, Looseley is concerned to analyse the mythical status of this figure, probably the best-known singer of French popular music for audiences in the English-speaking world. The reason for his avoidance of the biographical approach is that the mythical life-story of the ‘sparrow kid’ is largely a creation of the subject herself, who constantly embroidered and developed her narrative, with the complicity of managers and journalists, and used it to promote her songs and her performances, with huge international success that survives to this day. Looseley is concerned to understand the mechanisms that led to this remarkable public relations triumph. Piaf is not simply an icon for the national culture of France, but also a ‘diva’ who embodies a tragic destiny comparable to that of Billie Holliday, Judy Garland or even Maria Callas. Looseley highlights the inconsistencies in the accounts of her early years, often perpetuated by Piaf herself, and traces her early career from the ‘street singer’ of the mid 1930s, by way of cabaret performances, to the star of the French music-hall during the years of the German occupation of France from 1940 onwards. Her emergence as an international star in the years after the Second World War was the result of her successful career in the USA, culminating in prestigious performances at the Carnegie Hall in 1956 and 1957. Her battle with ill-health and drug addiction was conducted largely in public and when she died in 1963 she was given to all intents and purposes a state funeral. David Looseley's trawl through the secondary literature behind this well-known story is impeccable in its scholarly thoroughness, as he unearths telling journalistic reviews of her performances, revealing anecdotes from the memoirs of her team of collaborators, and not just in the French context, but also from her North American career, where the resonances are markedly different: she becomes a representative of a resurgent France. Looseley's analysis doesn't stop with her death, however; he unpicks the ways her posterity has been constructed and perpetuated up to the centenary of her birth in 2015. He traces the way her legacy can be recognised in the way more recent singers such as Mireille Mathieu, Patricia Kaas and Zaz are concerned to appropriate some of her aura and prestige, as well as the international success of the biographical film by Olivier Dahan, La Môme (or La Vie en Rose) of 2007, which launched the career of Marion Cotillard. She has also been extensively commemorated in the UK by numerous performances of Pam Gems’ play Piaf, that combines the soap-opera of her life with her best-known songs. David Looseley's volume is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the complexity behind the mythical figure of Piaf, and it provides an admirable model for a searching analysis of the myth-making machinery of popular music.