Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016. SIGNED. 1st/1st. Purchased New. NF/F. Stated First Edition. First printing with complete 10 number line ending in 1. Signed by James McBride on the title page. The book is tight and square with solid hinges and binding and sharp tips. Small publisher irregularity on mid front cover next to the red backstrip (see photos), else covers are clean and unmarred. The textblock is clean with no writing, bookplate, or markings and not BCE, ex-library, or remaindered. The dust jacket is unclipped ($28.00) and Fine. Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover.

National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the "real" James Brown after receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth. His surprising journey illuminates not only our understanding of this immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated soul genius but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown's legacy.

Through McBride's lens, James Brown's rough-and-tumble life can be viewed as a metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, conflicts between blacks and whites, and the rich versus the poor. McBride travels to corners of Brown's never-before-revealed history such as the country town where Brown's family, among thousands of others, were displaced by a nuclear power bomb-making facility and South Carolina, where Brown's sharecropping childhood is revealed. He talks to the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound and interviews Al Sharpton, who refers to himself as Brown's "adopted son". Finally, there is the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown's estate, which cost millions in legal fees and left James Brown's body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter's yard in South Carolina.