ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

Inside the brief, brilliant, and tragically reckless life of Tupac Shakur (1971-1996).

Pearlman, a sportswriter by trade (The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, 2022, etc.), seems an odd fit as a biographer of a hip-hop icon, but his reportorial chops and distance from the hip-hop world are largely an advantage here. He uncovers a complex persona who at once dominated ’90s and rap and succumbed to its worst influences. Shakur was raised in New York and Baltimore by his mother, Afeni Shakur, who worked with the Black Panthers and other groups devoted to improving Black lives. But it’s more correct to say he was hardly raised at all, as she fell victim to a crack addiction in the ’80s. Shakur found a sanctuary at a Baltimore arts school, and the acting skills he developed there served him well when he headed west. In the early ’90s he was both a rising film actor and rapper (“I always thought he was one or two movies away from Academy Award talk,” said his Gang Related co-star Jim Belushi), but internally he was going south. He could be wildly mercurial—Pearlman’s sources suggest Shakur had undiagnosed ADHD—serving prison time for sexual assault, suffering paranoid delusions (particularly around rival MC Biggie Smalls), and, at the instigation of record exec Suge Knight, developing a belligerent persona that insiders felt was forced (his infamous “thug life” tattoo puzzled many) and speeded his murder in Las Vegas. Pearlman spoke to many in Shakur’s orbit, from family (his sister, Set, is particularly poignant and observant) to entourage members, to the man who, abandoned as a newborn, inspired Shakur to write his classic “Brenda’s Got a Baby.”

A thorough accounting of a complex figure.