Late last month, the Los Angeles Police DepartmentindictedDuane Keith Davis in the murder of Tupac Shakur. His arrest, the first involving Shakur’s long-unsolved death, comes some 27 years after a white Cadillac pulled up next to the rapper and actor at a Las Vegas stoplight and sent four bullets into his body, ultimately killing him at the age of 25. The charge, and the chatter that has followed since, speaks to the enduring interest and legacy in arguably the most mythologized figure in hip-hop. Over a quarter of a century later, we’re still talking and wondering about Tupac.

It’s why Staci Robinson’s new book, “Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,” the first biography approved by Shakur’s estate, still feels relevant, promising to offer a new kind of access to such a storied life and career. Yet readers won’t get an ounce of speculation or new evidence around one of the great unresolved mysteries in modern entertainment history. This comes likely out of respect for Shakur, a natural facet of a work that is being overseen by his estate. The book wants to focus on and celebrate Shakur’s life as it was lived, not revel in the sensationalized theories around his death.

It is, of course, a perfectly fair approach — Shakur’s life was fascinating enough, after all. That much one will easily glean from Robinson’s straightforward, somewhat sedate retelling of a life that started in the fiery womb of revolutionary politics, when Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, successfully defended herself in the infamous Panther 21 trial while pregnant with Tupac, and ended at the pinnacle of American pop culture. And yet, beyond his death, the larger, more abstract questions about Shakur, and the events in his life that might give us the right answers, remain opaque in Robinson’s account.

In other words, readers looking for new insights into an artist whose life has already been endlessly picked apart will likely not find any here. What the book offers instead is a recounting that is comprehensive mostly in the breadth of its summary, tracking an unstable and poor childhood that traversed from New York to Baltimore to the Bay Area, before Shakur broke through the music industry and Hollywood like a blazing, unstoppable comet in his early 20s. Raised by an activist mother, whose drug addiction periodically drove a wedge between them, Shakur carried a lifelong defiance that was tempered by his star-making charisma and insatiable, unruly creative passion.

我们得到这个清楚他在他的早期,but in the meatier parts of Shakur’s life, Robinson, who knew Shakur as a teen and had been asked personally by Afeni to write the biography, is too focused on simply keeping the timeline moving along. In the stretches where fame and his self-described “big mouth” garner intense scrutiny in the media and in the streets, the book struggles to settle into or offer a vivid picture of the scenes, major or minor, that could make one actually feel present in Shakur’s world. It’s a book, in short, that exists too much in synopsis. Even the description of the actual shooting that killed him, along with the aftermath in the hospital, is strangely terse, amounting to a couple of pages that abruptly end the book.

One wonders how much this approach comes as a result of the estate’s hand guiding Robinson’s pen, as if it doesn’t want us to get too close to any of the noisy drama and chatter that fed both the paranoia and real danger that swirled around Shakur in the last couple years of his life. But the result is an unnecessarily limiting portrait. As an officially authorized biographer, Robinson ostensibly had unparalleled access to exclusive interviews and various documents from the notebooks Shakur was always scribbling in (photos of some of these pages are included in the book). And yet, those voices, either of those Robinson interviewed or of Shakur himself, fail to chime in at the most crucial points.

Most notably, nobody is really there to give us an intimate or concrete sense of how exactly the conflicting forces in Shakur’s life turned a sensitive theater kid, who was intensely focused on empowering Black people and uniting the disenfranchised, into a star who seemed to unnecessarily thrust himself into a world of violence. There are, of course, pat answers: His innate hotheadedness mixed too lethally with the chaos of intense fame and success. But Robinson largely avoids interrogating this central, tragic question.

Instead, the book creates a primer on Shakur as the familiar icon: a star who was intensely hard-working, political-minded, and as charming and talented as he was volatile. It’s an honest and often inspiring version of who Shakur really was, too. But it’s the same one we’ve heard before.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.