Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur by Jeff Pearlman

Only God Can Judge Me is an early candidate for BK Reads book of the year. Jeff Pearlman’s writing is awesome, and he conducted over 700 interviews with people who knew Tupac, his family, and his work. Pearlman knows Tupac, and the story is heartbreaking. The writing is also hilarious–Pearlman even tracked down his high school girlfriends and includes segments from his love letters (throw your gang perceptions out the window). 

Tupac’s mom was a rising star in a female activist role for the Black Panthers before getting addicted to crack. He did not know his dad, and he never had stable male figures in his life. The extreme poverty of his childhood colors every piece of his adult life, and the dysfunction of trying to survive as the child of a crack addict had lasting effects on his work and his relationship with his mom and sister. 

Tupac was a theater nerd with a weird name. He was extremely poor, and his teeth were in terrible shape. Girls did not like him (until he attended the prestigious Baltimore School of the Arts), and many of his high school classmates thought he was gay. He was soft and sensitive, and he wrote endless amounts of poetry. He was a prodigy, and his early studio time was largely funded by gang members with drug money. 

When the lights turned on, Tupac shined. He was the ultimate performer in the studio, on stage, and on camera–and he continued to secure new roles and opportunities despite being a huge challenge for the managers/business professionals in his life.

I really did not know Tupac’s backstory prior to reading this book. I knew about his early death and some of his music but nothing about him as a person. I would recommend this book to anyone. 

Quotes

“But for all her shortcomings as a parent, Afeni instilled a potent sense of Black pride in her son. Even in a diminished state, she reminded her children that they were descendants of kings and queens. That Black was beautiful. So as he began to think about music, and as he started (infrequently, at first) jotting down ideas into a notebook, the etchings rarely boasted of riches (he had none) or bitches (also none), but freedom, liberation, forcefulness. Whereas other aspiring rappers were paying homage to Rolls-Royce and Foxy Brown, Tupac, not yet a teen, was thinking Malcolm X.”

“Girls laughed about him,” Carter said. “I didn’t. He was nice. But the smell, the teeth, no money, so small. Tupac was no catch, I can tell you that.”

“What Afeni quickly realized, to both her astonishment and horror, was that, in two years at Baltimore School of Art, Tupac had lost much of the edge she had tried to instill in him. The son of a Black Panther had dated white girls named Mary and Avra. He was citing Shakespeare and weeping (weeping!) to Kate Bush songs and writing letters that included sentiments like “Everything is so beautiful since I fell in love!” “My son,” Afeni confided to friends, “is sort of a pussy.”

 “He was clueless on how the real-life game goes,” said Marku Reynolds, a local rapper and dealer. “He was completely absent-minded to street values. He watched movies and pretended to have swagger. But it wasn’t real. The man could talk a hungry dog off a meat wagon, but he couldn’t fight, couldn’t drive, couldn’t play basketball, couldn’t sell drugs. He was pretending.”

“Everything about Tupac felt surprising and different. He was a Black kid who loved theater. He was an artistic kid who couldn’t sing. He was a shit talker who couldn’t fight. He was a rapper who listened to Don McLean and Kate Bush. He was a mama’s boy sleeping on a friend’s couch. He took the bus from the Jungle, only to roll with the hippies and gays. He was rough and effeminate, upbeat and depressed.”

Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi

Never Eat Alone is a re-read for me. I initially read it as a junior in college, and it was a complete game changer for me. I knew nothing about networking, and I didn’t realize its importance to finding your first job and building a future career. I applied a lot of the frameworks Keith Ferrazzi details in the book, and it also sent me down the business book rabbit hole to see what else I could learn about finding a career.

I recently helped lead an event for young professionals to learn about networking, and I returned to this book. Fifteen years later with actual work experience, I have a completely new lens on Never Eat Alone, and it still holds weight. I think Ferrazzi’s approach to follow-up and his tactical tips on how to connect with individuals is accurate and arguably timeless. 

On my second read, I appreciated the chapter on connecting with individuals at conferences since it is more relevant to my current role, and I think the added sections on digital connection/content creation are timely.

Quotes

“And the rule in life that has unprecedented power is that the individual who knows the right people, for the right reasons, and utilizes the power of these relationships, can become a member of the “club,” whether he started out as a caddie or not.”

“I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful. It was about working hard to give more than you get. And “here’s the hard part: You’ve got to be more than willing to accept generosity. Often, you’ve got to go out and ask for it.”

“Those who are best at it don’t network—they make friends. They gain admirers and win trust precisely because their amicable overtures extend to everyone. A widening circle of influence is an unintended result, not a calculated aim.”

“Those who use conferences properly have a huge leg up at your average industry gathering. While others quietly sit taking notes, content to sip their free bottled water, these men and women are setting up one-on-one meetings, organizing dinners, and, in general, making each conference an opportunity to meet people who could change their lives.”

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding… Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis by Sam Anderson

I love reading about city history (send me any favorite recommendations!). Boom Town tells the story of Oklahoma City through the city’s acquisition of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team. The OKC civic culture includes a long history of theft–the city’s land from Native American territory (Oklahoma City didn’t exist until 1889), urban renewal land from the African American community, and more recently–the Seattle Supersonics.

Anderson tells great stories about the individuals who founded and built OKC. I especially enjoyed the profiles of Stanley Draper, original Chamber of Commerce CEO, Gary England, a beloved weatherman and tornado chaser, and Sam Presti, GM of the OKC Thunder. 

The city aspires and schemes for greatness but often falls short. Anderson captures the nuances and heartbreak of the civic gambling (the city destroys its downtown core during an urban renewal project in the 1970s), and the section on the Oklahoma City bombing will make you cry. Modern OKC is slightly happier…but the overall view of the city is not charitable. 

The chapters bounce back and forth between the present day with OKC Thunder focus and the past. It was a little distracting, and there are some weird chapters about Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips band based in OKC) that I could have lived without. Overall, solid read. 

Quotes

“From its very first moment, OKC has always wanted to hurry up—to exist, somehow, in its own glorious future. It has never been able to do so, of course. The future it hurls itself into is never the future it was fantasizing about.”

“The city was not a destination but a crossroads, a hub. It grew, accordingly, on secondary industries: moving and storing and selling other people’s stuff.”

“Researchers noticed, right away, something peculiar about the citizens of Oklahoma City: a “general reluctance to complain about local problems,” as they would put it in their official report, perhaps due to a “general feeling of futility.”

“Despite the Thunder, despite all the new restaurants and coffee shops and the bike-share program, downtown OKC still has a particular way of feeling devastatingly barren—something deep in its DNA, the original prairie asserting itself, whispering emptiness through the thin concrete crust of civilization, the wind circulating its absence into every inch of open space. The streets get so wide and quiet, the sky seems so big and dark, that it feels like nothing has ever happened there or will ever happen again.”

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin 

1929 tells the inside story of the Great Depression. Sorkin follows the characters who created the conditions for the stock market crash, the regulators chasing them, and the politicians trying to dig the country out (and pass blame). Sorkin argues that the crash is caused by banks allowing/encouraging individual investors across the country to purchase stocks on credit. The stocks were collateral for the credit, and when the stocks went down–the country went bankrupt. 

This book is probably a little dry for most people, but I thought it was well-written and informative. 

Quote

“Ultimately, the story of 1929 is not about rates or regulation, nor about the cleverness of short sellers or the failures of bankers. It is about something far more enduring: human nature. No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.”