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Detroit, February 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
US Guys, February 2007
Hardcover
An American Autopsy
Penguin Press
February 2013
On Sale: February 7, 2013
304 pages ISBN: 1594205345 EAN: 9781594205347 Kindle: B008EKOP1I Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Back 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. 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.”
Having led us on the way up, Detroit now
seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest
city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. 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. It is an eerie and angry place of deserted
factories and abandoned homes and forgotten people. Trees
and switchgrass and wild animals have come back to reclaim
their right¬ful places. Coyotes are here. The pigeons have
left. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could
neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots. 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.”
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. He embeds with a local fire brigade
struggling to defend its city against systemic arson and
bureaucratic corruption. 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 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.
If Detroit is America’s vanguard in
good times and bad, then here is the only place to turn for
guid¬ance in our troubled era. While redemption is thin on
the ground in this ghost of a city, Detroit: An American
Autopsy is no hopeless parable. LeDuff shares an
unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled
with some of the strangest and strongest people our country
has to offer. Detroit is a dark comedy of the absurdity of
American life in the twenty-first century, a deeply human
drama of colossal greed and endurance, ignorance and courage.
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