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The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
by Jeff Pearlman
Scrutinized in life, mythologized in death, Tupac Shakur remains a subject of immense cultural significance and speculation nearly thirty years after his murder.
Despite a multitude of books, documentaries, and even a feature film, much about Tupac's story remains shrouded and misunderstood. Like many icons who died tragically young, Tupac the man has long been obscured—his edges sanded down, his complexity numbed—by the competing agendas that surround his legacy.
In Only God Can Judge Me, accomplished biographer and New York Times bestselling author Jeff Pearlman tackles his most nuanced subject, telling the definitive story of Tupac Shakur in unprecedented depth. In this authoritative look at Tupac's life, Pearlman skillfully recreates West Coast hip hop in all its glory, going inside Death Row Records and on the sets of movies like Juice and Poetic Justice to offer the most clear-eyed rendering to date of the man who still casts a shadow over modern hip hop. But more than just a biography of a complicated figure, Only God Can Judge Me also captures the time and place in which Tupac rose, a singular moment in music history when West Coast hip hop became a phenomenon and transformed popular music.
Featuring nearly seven hundred original interviews and never-before-published details from every corner of Tupac's life, the result offers a truly singular portrait of one of modern pop culture's most towering figures. Guided by the voices of those who knew and lived life alongside him, Only God Can Judge Me captures the layers of a man who, even thirty years after his death, remains as elusive as ever.
"[An] excellent biography...Pearlman paints a complex, three-dimensional portrait of a passionate artist who could be single-minded and obstinate, who was driven by a nagging need 'to fulfill his destiny before it was too late' (which became tragically prescient when he was killed in 1996)...The result is an endlessly captivating portrait of a singular artist." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A thorough accounting of a complex figure." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Tupac Shakur's life has been explored and excavated longer than he lived. Yet, Pearlman delivers rich, engrossing, and fascinating new details about Shakur's life and legacy—not just once or twice—but throughout each lively page. He takes us through the streets Shakur walked in New York, Baltimore, Marin, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas in revealing the brilliant, troubled man and not just a caricature or myth. This is the type of needed journalism, reporting, and biography that finally and deservedly provides the definitive historic account on Shakur." —Jonathan Abrams, author of The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop
"A rollicking, smoke-filled joyride through the life of one of our generation's greatest street poets. Jeff Pearlman unfurls Tupac's complex, brilliant and troubled story like a Shakespearean drama, with the detail and punch only he could deliver. Along the way, he excavates themes of race, class, social justice and hip hop history. Pearlman's best work yet." —Rick Jervis, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author of The Devil Behind the Badge.
This information about Only God Can Judge Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jeff Pearlman is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books. His subjects include NFL legends Walter Payton (Sweetness), Brett Favre (Gunslinger), and Bo Jackson (The Last Folk Hero), as well as the '80s Los Angeles Lakers (Showtime), the 1986 New York Mets (The Bad Guys Won), and the '90s Dallas Cowboys (Boys Will Be Boys). HBO adapted Showtime into the dramatic series Winning Time, produced and directed by Adam McKay. A former Sports Illustrated senior writer and ESPN.com columnist, Pearlman is the host of the Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast.
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