“I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon” by Toure (Atria 160 pages, $19.99)

Here are things you may not have known about Prince: In high school, he was a decent basketball player. And “Amadeus” was at one point his favorite movie.

These tidbits, and others, emerge in Toure’s new book about the enigmatic pop star, “I Would Die 4 U.” But if the author (and MSNBC host) presents them with a hunter’s pride, he is mostly chasing bigger game here, bypassing the minutiae of biography on his way to figuring out, as his subtitle puts it, why Prince became an icon.

It’s well organized. Toure divides the book into three sections, each addressing a different aspect of Prince’s work: its sexual content, its religious imagery and its connection to a post-boomer generation shaped by divorce. His premise is that Prince’s megastardom came as a result of his ability to synthesize those themes for an audience knee-deep in personal and political contradiction.

Refreshingly, that insistence on Prince’s importance doesn’t push “I Would Die 4 U” into pop-culture hagiography: Toure has plenty to say, both firsthand and via friends and associates, about how difficult the artist can be to deal with. For Prince, as in church, there is no pleasure without pain.