Only God Can Judge Me
The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Publisher Description
“Jeff Pearlman breaks down Tupac’s life like a veteran sportswriter examining a dynasty. This detailed look at his life is the work of a writer who understands the ego of greatness.”—Chuck D
“Pearlman delivers rich, engrossing, and fascinating new details about Shakur’s life and legacy—not just once or twice—but throughout each lively page...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
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Pearlman (The Last Folk Hero) chronicles the brief, chaotic life of rap legend Tupac Shakur in this excellent biography. Shakur was born in 1971 to mother Afeni, a Black Panther who successfully defended herself in the Panther 21 trial but fell into crack addiction, often leaving Shakur to fend for himself. They moved from New York to Baltimore in 1984 and later to California, where Shakur found acting success as an "intimidating street hustler" in 1992's Juice, a role the sensitive young man sometimes seemed to play in real life to gain acceptance, according to Pearlman. That persona—along with drugs, alcohol, the effects of childhood trauma, and a general recklessness—contributed to Shakur's erratic, sometimes criminal behavior, Pearlman suggests. (He was convicted and imprisoned for sexual assault in 1995, the same year his album Me Against the World launched him to commercial success.) Drawing on interviews with nearly everyone in Shakur's orbit, including the man who, as an infant, inspired "Brenda's Got a Baby," 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), and whose contradictions were many (his legacy as "hip-hop's greatest booster of women" seemingly runs counter to the numerous sexual assault allegations made against him). The result is an endlessly captivating portrait of a singular artist.
