While redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. If Detroit is America's vanguard in good times and bad, then here is the only place to turn for guidance in our troubled era. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners, and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. He investigates politicians of all stripes, from the smooth-talking mayor to career police officials to ministers of the backstreets, following the paperwork to discover who benefits from Detroit's decline. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its city against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption.
With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. After revealing that the city's murder rate is higher than the official police number-making it the highest in the country-a weary old detective tells LeDuff, "In this city two plus two equals three." A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit's vacant lots. Trees and switchgrass and wild animals have come back to reclaim their rightful places. It is an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and abandoned homes and forgotten people. Once the vanguard of America's machine age-mass production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles-Detroit is now America's capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation's poorest. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Detroit is where his mother's flower shop was firebombed in the pre-Halloween orgy of arson known as Devil's Night where his sister lost herself to the west side streets where his brother, who once sold subprime mortgages with skill and silk, now works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as "May Be Made in United States." Iggy Pop meets Jim Carroll and Charles Bukowski"īack in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches through the ruins for clues to its fate, his family's, and his own. "A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.
0 kommentar(er)
