LeDuff chronicles the city’s birth as a beaver-trading post in 1701, through its salad days as the world’s automobile capital, and into a long decline marked by race riots, deindustrialization, appalling corporate stupidity, union greed, and denial. His socially conscious writing rivals that of Jonathan Kozol and Alex Kotlowitz. ” (19) A very good reporter, I hasten to add–one whose gonzo journalism is eminently more vivid and readable than anything coming from academia. Some have called him a Good Samaritan, but LeDuff’s having none of it. Along the way we meet people trying their best to scrape by with wallets, integrity, and pride intact, and several that LeDuff’s investigative journalism manages to help. It’s a city in which children must bring their own toilet paper to school, arson is as common as a snowy winter day, and a guy who threatens to mug you for a dollar can be bought off for fifty cents.

Detroit is where his prostitute sister died when she leapt from a car driven by a dangerous john, where his niece overdosed on heroin, and where a fire fighter buddy died in a blaze started by a street punk hired by a shady landlord that wanted to collect insurance money. Or white auto executives who took taxpayer bailout money and invested it elsewhere. Congressman John Conyers, who did 27 months for bribery and kickbacks during her eight months as president of the Detroit City Council. Or Michelle Conyers, the 47-year-old wife of 84-year-old U.S. There’s no money to be made in Detroit, unless you’re a politician like Kwame Fitzpatrick, who is doing 28 years when instead of being the city’s first self-proclaimed hip-hop mayor he became a crook with a penchant for phone sex, strippers, and skimming the city’s shallow public trough–just like his predecessors. Who would want to live there, let alone do what LeDuff did: walk away from the New York Times to write a book, move from the warmth of Los Angeles to Michigan in the dead of winter, and take a job with the Detroit News? It might be home, but Detroit? After all, Le Duff’s book is subtitled An American Autopsy. The auto plants are mostly gone and the few jobs that remain pay $14 an hour, which adjusted for inflation, “…is three cents less than what Henry Ford was paying in 1914 when he announced the $5 day.

It’s guys who take $20 and the promise of a truck to torch a house, of street walkers turning tricks inside of derelict auto factories, of fried corpses hanging from the live wires they tried to strip for copper, of a dead man chucked down a shaft and frozen in a block of ice, of police cars without radios, and fire fighters with holes in their boots. ISBN: 978-0-14312446-7.Ĭharlie LeDuff’s portrait of Detroit is horrifying and uncompromising.

The americans with charlie leduff