Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, Groundbreaking Work on Besieged Icon
Review: This is by far the most brilliant, insightful, cutting-edge treatment of Tupac and hip-hop culture available. Dyson doesn't offer a biography per se, and no one who is familiar with his equally impressive work on Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., would expect such a work. Dyson is helping to pioneer a distinctive new genre of scholarship: a seamless fusion of critical evaluation of an icon's life and a searching examination of that person's life and times. As such, this work takes its place as a sophisticated, meditative and scintillating tour through the dark passages of Tupac's complex music and his surprisingly nimble mind.The way Dyson sets the book up is compelling: He looks at Tupac's childhood, his mature artistry, and the beliefs that motivated his most thrilling achievements. I appreciate his joining Tupac's difficult childhood -- including his mother's drug abuse -- to both the political aspirations of a troubled revolutionary career (his mother was a Black Panther) and to the plague of poverty that cursed them. Dyson then convincingly links these stark realities to Tupac's plentiful and brooding music, and to the themes that would obsess him: death, betrayal, hopelessness, the search for forgiveness, spirituality, transcendence, racial authenticity and thug life. Dyson manages, in the process, to not only write about Tupac, but about the heartless vicissitudes that haunt millions of black youth. His discussion of the "n" word controversy is brilliant, as are his examinations of the contradictions that pile up around "keeping it real," the mantra of so much hip-hop culture. He tackles gender problems (in a gem of a word coinage, what he terms "femiphobia," which is simply illuminating for the way it manages to pry a space between old-style misogyny and outright sexism), while also dealing with Tupac's bold religious views. Dyson's chapter on Tupac's sense of embodiment is one of the most lyrical in the book, although it virtually sings throughout. Dyson is one of the few world-class scholars -- and in this regard, he is nearly in a class by himself -- who is capable of both rigorous analysis and poetic declaration. What is particularly winning about Dyson's book is the list of "firsts" he manages to accumulate: the first time we hear a prison interview he gave; the first time we hear about a video of the rapper when he was only 17; and the first time we hear from a variety of cultural and social commentators (there are over 60 original interviews in the book, if I counted correctly, including the likes of Quincy Jones, Stanley Crouch, Mos Def, Toni Morrison, Afeni Shakur, Common, Talib Kweli, Samuel Jackson, and Jada Pinkett) on the life of this most extraordinary young man. One of the most amazing things I learned -- and there are many features that fall in this category -- is the utter intelligence that characterized Shakur's life. Dyson devotes an entire chapter to outlining the rapper's reading, and that alone is worth the price of the book. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is an intellectual tour de force by perhaps the most brilliant intellectual of his generation. For Dyson to have written the kind of utterly original book he did on Martin Luther King, Jr., only to come back in a year's time to deliver an equally powerful reflection on such a controversial, gifted and important artist as Tupac, is in itself a remarkable feat. We are all in his debt.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent, but not enlightening at all
Review: This was a good, well-written book, but overall it is somewhat blahzay blahzay... it's one of these books that really does not have much to say and rambles for a long period of time. It's not a biography by any means-- the facts of Tupac's life are mostly 1) missing 2)inaccurate 3)scattered... it is not written in chronological order, rather in the form of 5 long-form essays about Tupac, which in the end do not leave the reader with a very good picture of who Tupac was or what he was trying to say in his music. Very few actual quotes from Tupac's music are used, and when they are, they are haphazardly and choppily introduced. The picture Dyson paints is far too superficial and this book will certainly not stand the test of time as a quality publication about Shakur. Don't let this review fool you: I love Tupac's music as much, if not more, than I love the work of people like Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye... but this book is just not what I was looking for in a book-- You can learn a lot more about who Tupac was, and what he means to your life by going out there and buying his 2 great records: "Me Against the World" and "Makaveli." My hats off to Dyson for undertaking to write about Tupac.. but he has clearly failed. This book is, simply put, weak and superficial. He really has nothing new or exciting to say about Tupac, and though I have great respect for Michael Eric Dyson-- he should've written the book before he signed the deal to write a book about Tupac (the best-selling most respected rapper of all time)
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