Book of the Week: Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (2025) by Jeff Pearlman

Of all the rappers one could put on a hypothetical Mt. Rushmore, Tupac Shakur seems to be considered the George Washington choice. I have, of course, heard Tupac's music my entire life, but I've never had the education necessary for such reverence. Luckily, Jeff Pearlman's new biography, Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (Mariner Books, $32.50), not only aims to be a definitive look at the man, but also examines the myth and the legend behind him.

In many ways, this makes me the perfect audience for Pearlman's book. It also helps that I've been a longtime reader of his work, including an early look at his Bo Jackson biography and the time I read nearly every page of his Showtime Lakers book in one day of jury duty. Pearlman, who, as you can see, has made his living as a sportswriter, seems like an unlikely candidate for writing about hip-hop history, but what he brings to the project is a few decades of high journalistic standards. He interviewed over 600 people for the project, retraced Tupac's steps all over the country, and tried to find the truth in the endless sea of misinformation - as he did so well in the Bo Jackson book, which is, fittingly, titled The Last Folk Hero. Hell, just the prologue of Only God Can Judge Me, a story about not only reunions and redemptions, but journalistic instinct and unrelenting research and his partnership with a world-class genealogist, made me cry. Not tear up, cry cry.

A lot of Pearlman's book gave me chills, though that was not always a credit to the writing. For a few years, Tupac lived in Baltimore, a city that I now call home. I live about five minutes away from his teenhood home. My first apartment looked over the Baltimore School for the Arts, which Tupac attended for two years. I read Pearlman's account of his miserable experience at his first high school, Paul Laurence Dunbar, during my lunch breaks teaching at Dunbar. The biography felt real to me in a way that most books simply can't. This, of course, is a mix of both happenstance and my affinity for Pearlman's writing.

As Tupac's career began, those feelings obviously dissipated, but I enjoyed the well-researched portrayal. Most of this was new to me, and while I can't accurately say whether or not Pearlman achieved his goal of writing the definitive Tupac biography, I believe he's made a strong case. I would imagine that people who think that they know the whole history will still find something new in this book. Those with bad attitudes about the biography may never be convinced, and pre-existing readers like myself may be more inclined to read it with an open mind - I am, after all, already looking forward to the next Pearlman project.