Customer Reviews

Tupac Shakur: The Life and Times of an American Icon

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Let me start off by saying that I'm a HUGE Tupac fan, throughout the good bad and the ugly. I've studied his work, and other books based on his life. None of them touch this one. Even as a fan that's read up on the man, this book gives you so much more. I read it within 3 days and at it's end i wanted more. There so much background and detail to paint the imperfect image of Tupac Shakur that you feel like you're meeting him for the first time. What I loved most is that the book isn't glorifying Tupac as some kind of saint, but more touching on his successes and failures as a man and an artist.

If you're a fan or just interested in why he impacted both Hip-Hop and American as a whole, it's a must read.

ITS STARTS THE WHOLE FACTS OF WHY LIFE IS WHAT OT IS TODAY. HE CAME ALONG WAY AND MADE IT LOOK SO EASY ON THE DOWNLOAD. JUST KNOW WE MAKE LIFE WHAT IT IS TODAY WITH OUR MIND SET...

I've read a lot of books about Tupac and 1990s rap music. This era is what defined the boundaries of rap music and if you listen to what rappers were rapping back then, you realize whats being said today was already said, and that all the rappers of today are profiting off of what Bigge and Pac made possible. As you can tell I take the life and times of Tupac Shakur very seriously and because of that this book offends my soul.

If you are looking for a very general and easy to read adventure through Pac's life then look no further, the authors write very short chapters, the shootings that Pac endures take up no more than ten pages, which is ridiculous to me (Although that could be because I read a book called "LAbyrinth" that is entirely dedicated to researching just those two incidents). The authors have a PHD and will often interject long and and unnecessary backgrounds of people and places to give the impression that they are putting Tupac in context but judging from the way they talk about the music it is clear they have no idea what they are dealing with. For the most part they get a lot of stuff right, but they leave out IMMENSE amounts of information. For example, the movie Gang Related and Bullet were completely ignored (possibly because they were released after his death, i'm not sure). They also referred to Mickey Rourke as being a part of the movie Juice, and that's just wrong and bad research. It implies that they haven't seen Juice, which was Tupac's most famous performance!

It's not a bad book, you will enjoy a lot of it if you like Tupac but if you are VERY interested in getting as much new information about Tupac as you can, this book offers nothing new. It takes its best parts from other books already written. The best book it uses is called "Got Your Back" and its written by Pac's close friend and personal bodyguard at Death Row. It is worth a whole lot more than this book because it gives you a clear sense of the man and not just a run-though of all the publicized events that defined him.