"The One," James Brown Biography by R J Smith R J Smith does not have to explain why his big new biography of James Brown is such a showstopper. This book's sparkle speaks for itself, as does Mr. Smith's ability to take on his screaming, moaning, kinetically blessed, unbeatably shrewd subject. It takes a nervy authorial voice to describe James Brown with anything better than awe, mimicry or condescension. It takes a prescient writer to look at a picture of 9-year-old James Brown and see the boy who is father to the man: "mouth unsmiling, the head tilted at an angle that sends a message - got something for me?" The Life and Music of James Brown By R J Smith 455 pages. Gotham Books. $27.50. State of Alabama, Department of Archives and History James Brown singing at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., in 1966. Mr. Brown, with cape, at Alabama State College Arena in Montgomery in 1965. Lovability was not Mr. Brown's salient attribute. So the reader who knows little of Mr. Brown's story may not instantly grasp why that story is so mesmerizing. For that reader, three words of advice: "Please, Please, Please." Just watch the YouTube video of Mr. Brown performing that song in "The T.A.M.I. Show," the deservedly legendary 1964 concert film so diverse that it also included a performance of "Dance, Dance, Dance" by the Beach Boys. For starters Mr. Brown's theatrics will explain why "The One" is this book's title. It describes but doesn't come from Mr. Brown's stature. Instead it denotes his signature emphasis on the first beat in a four-beat measure. "The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor," Mr. Brown said, explaining that tactic in typically cryptic but catchy fashion. He also liked to say that he wore his hair in a big bouffant "so people don't say where he is, but there he is." That way with words, and of course the music and persona, made Mr. Brown a culture critics" darling. Other books - including "The James Brown Reader," an anthology that spans 50 of his 73 years - talk about him abundantly, but Mr. Smith is a writer who talks back. For instance he describes Mr. Brown's recording of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" as "a most peculiar ad for virility: a promise that it will make you alone, depraved and howling like a jackal." And about Mr. Brown's treatment of those around him, Mr. Smith (who spoke to many sources) writes: "Cruel powers. Everybody has a story or 10. "The One" describes a childhood so tough and raw that it may help explain what made the adult Mr. Brown such a terror. Mr. Smith writes about Mr. Brown's early years on the Georgia-South Carolina border, the tumultuous region in which he spent most of his life. By his teenage years he had been left by both parents, picked cotton, shined shoes, been a boxer, lived in a brothel and been sent to juvenile institutions where the emphasis on orderliness and rules made a big impression. As a traveling musician he fired band members for real and imagined trespasses. This book says he imposed a $100 fine for using Vaseline to fake a shine on shoes. "The One" follows Mr. Brown's rise as a live performer whose stage tricks sometimes had pragmatic origins. When audiences threw coins, "Brown quickly deduced the advantage of busting out a flamboyant stage-front split at such moments," Mr. Smith writes. Some of these stories come from Mr. Brown's 1987 book, "The Godfather of Soul," but Mr. Smith culls, shapes and amplifies them very well. "The One" also describes Mr. Brown's difficulties in making records: His tough mug was not initially used on album covers, and his music was not well suited to short, radio-friendly songs. Then there was the crossover problem. When he was booked on "American Bandstand" in 1961, Mr. Smith writes, what Mr. Brown could look out and see was "a white audience still beyond his reach." Though he reached large white audiences mostly when he was past his prime with black listeners, Mr. Brown turned his vocal specialty into something universally recognizable. "It is an amazing thing to hear a scream vibrate like that, and it shows the control Brown has over a technique most often used to signify a loss of control," Mr. Smith writes. This is an insight that describes much more than Mr. Brown's music. The James Brown way to "make a paradoxically freedom-drenched art out of radical acts of discipline" also accounts for his unusual role in politics, as both an avatar of black capitalism and comrade of Strom Thurmond, the longtime Senator from South Carolina. ("Can't do all black," Mr. Brown said about Mr. Thurmond. "He's a friend of mine.") And while he also made a public alliance with President Richard M. Nixon, the president can be heard on a White House recording asking, "What am I supposed to do, sit and talk to him?" Mr. Smith makes a case for why Mr. Brown's activism, for all its public-relations value, was too idiosyncratic to echo anybody else's ideology. One of his best sources is the Rev. Al Sharpton, who became a Brown protégé at the impressionable age of 18 and committed himself, at Mr. Brown's request, to a Brown-style hairdo. Mr. Smith also does his best to explain how a man who could be so outspoken about fairness could be so violent with the many women in his life. "I've got the Lord in one hand and the devil in the other," Mr. Brown said. You never know where it's going to come from. But he delivered many a harsh beating. A girlfriend who failed to watch Mr. Brown onstage with sufficient worshipfulness could count on the devil's catching up with her. The toughest part of Mr. Brown's life to explain is the painful post-glory era, after the temporary revival that the "Blues Brothers" films and "Rocky IV" provided. He kept on performing until he had to be brought to the stage in a wheelchair. He died in 2006. But he was a perfectionist who could not tolerate the diminishing of his physical powers. Perhaps this accounts for the PCP use and volcanic episodes of gun-toting craziness. A tantrum prompted by someone's use of his bathroom brought him an outrageously disproportionate six-year sentence for fleeing law officers and attempting to run them down in 1988. Mr. Brown's partisans have pointed out that a similar crime in Beverly Hills got a three-day sentence for Zsa Zsa Gabor. A later arrest brought the world a mug shot of James Brown as a disheveled mess. Perhaps that was the worst punishment of all. As "The One" points out, this was a man who liked to have his hair done three times a day (in the morning, before performing and after a show). "Every day of his life since 1956, before Brown stepped out of his house, he asked himself a single question," Mr. Smith writes: "Do I look like someone people would pay money to see?"