Book Review: The Hardest Working Man


Thanks to some time I had to kill before finals, I found a pretty decent book while kicking around the Kansas Union’s Oread Books. It’s entitled The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America. It’s by James Sullivan, and primarially is about how James Brown, along with various folks in the city of Boston, lessened the extent to which the citizens of the city rioted in comparison to the rest of the nation after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

Granted, that story’s pretty brief. The details flesh it out a bit, but the whole thing can be summed up pretty easily:

“King gets shot. James Brown is supposed to play a show at the Garden the next night. The city fathers get him to not only go on with the show, but guarantee his gate and broadcast it live, along with a repeat broadcast immediately following. City riots less than surrounding areas.”

Because the story isn’t really all that complicated, the book fleshes out the story with details regarding James Brown’s life, the story of race relations in Boston, how the rest of the nation reacted to King’s death, and the details of all the figures involved.

It’s a good read, if a bit fast. It almost seems glib, because it’s trying to flesh out a story that probably would have best been suited to a long-form magazine article (Mojo runs shit like this all the time). By adding in so many other details, nothing feels like it gets the treatment it deserves. The actual meat of Sullivan’s book (the subtitle, in other words) is spread so thinly through the book that it just seems to get lost in the shuffle. It’s a quick read, and vaguely entertaining, but not something that left any sort of lasting impression.

Chuck D’s foreword is pretty fly, however.

James Brown – “Try Me” (from 20 All Time Greatest Hits)