An Amerikan Family

Holley's history of the Shakur family works because it refuses to let Tupac's fame become the center of gravity. Instead the book moves outward and backward, tracing how Assata Shakur, Zayd Shakur, and other relatives were shaped by the Black Panther Party and, in turn, by COINTELPRO's surveillance and prosecutions. Built from interviews, court records, and archival documents rather than secondhand mythology, the narrative treats the family's activism and its cost — prison, exile, death — as inseparable from the country's response to it. The prose stays legible without flattening the politics, and Holley resists easy martyrdom narratives in favor of a more granular account of what organizing and repression actually looked like across three generations.