Is Detroit on its way back? Rolling Stone journalist Mark Binelli, a Motor City native, makes a strong case for "maybe" in Detroit City Is the Place to Be. The son of an immigrant Italian knife sharpener, Binelli revisits the streets of his youth, noting the "miles and miles of unplanned obsolescence" as he ticks off such colorfully named landmarks as Kung Food, Wash My Car, Mo' Money Tax Returns and Babes N Braids, but his balanced assessment of the city's current state is built on a solid foundation of good reporting as much as personal nostalgia. He digs into historical sources, conducts interviews and even attends a handgun training class: "If you are not prepared to shoot a 12-year-old, you shouldn't carry a handgun," the instructor warns his crime-frightened students. "If he's big enough to point a gun in your face, he's big enough to take a bullet."
Detroit once had the fourth-largest population of any U.S. city, but the two million citizens of 1950 have dropped to just 700,000 today, and unannexed suburbs control most of what's left of the tax base. Nonetheless, Binelli finds hope in 2010 census statistics showing a new influx of college-educated residents under 35 years old as well as in the migration of European and American artists to what is "the new Brooklyn [or] the next Berlin." Ever the journalist, however, he cautiously concludes: "When your city has 70,000 abandoned buildings, it will not be gentrified any time soon." --Bruce Jacobs