A Book A Week - Week 12: Detroit

This week's book:
    Detroit, An American Autopsy     by Charlie LeDuff

Grade:    A+  

This is kind of embarrassing, two 'A' ratings in a three-week span.  I'm going to look like I don't have a filter when actually I just got very lucky twice.  Not in a row, though, you need to give me that.  You also need to go out and buy this book, get it from the library, or borrow it from a friend.  It's that good.

I was looking forward to this one.  And Mr. LeDuff did not disappoint me.  This is an incredible book, essentially an account of his two years working at the Detroit News and what he learned about corruption and incompetence in the city that's become the example for everything gone wrong with America.  It's a story of self-discovery for Mr. LeDuff and a lesson in 'no matter how bad you think it is, the truth can be much, much worse.'

Detroit is the punch line to every joke, perhaps rightfully so.  But that doesn't make the people living there, stuck there, any less human than the rest of us, it just makes them unlucky and this book drives home that point solidly.  The city was Mr. LeDuff's hometown, but he got out early and knocked around until he fell into journalism and eventually found his way back.  He worked at the New York Times for years, and his prose shows he's more than surpassed the '10,000 hour' test for mastery.  His prose snaps, it makes you want to read more even when the subject is tragic beyond imagining and totally true.

This book is not reportage, though some parts come from his work in the News and from pieces published in Mother Jones, this is story telling in its purest form, revealing the truth as the author finds it, whether it's about his own long-hidden family history or hilariously awkward encounters with almost-certainly-deranged members of Detroit's City Council.  It's his journey as he tries to find out what's wrong with his hometown, if there's any hope of fixing it, and who might give a rat's ass in the first place.

Mr. LeDuff treats each of his subjects the same, whether they're a fireman, a CEO, a desperate mother who's lost two sons to street violence, or a homeless man found frozen in a block of ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft.  These are all just people, all part of the problem, all potentially part of the solution.  He calls out incompetence and corruption when he finds it, he risks himself to get the story, and he's unflinching in his own self-evaluation and his assessment of his family.  He not only accepts his warts, he celebrates them.

I think that's why I liked it so much.  This book is almost like a noir novel, dealing in the downtrodden, the little guy, the lumpen proletariat.  The forty-seven percenters.  Instead of holding them in contempt, Mr. LeDuff puts a face on each of them, and shows the results of government and business gone unrepentantly to the Dark Side.  It's a not just an autopsy on a corpse of a city, it's a warning for the entire nation.  Detroit just took the bullet before the rest of us.


Next week:
   Homer & Langley    by  E.L. Doctorow
   My next foray into modern 'LIT-ra-chaw.'  The last one didn't go so well.  Stay tuned.