In many ways, Charlie LeDuff's personal story overwhelms the account of the decline and fall of Motor City in Detroit: An American Autopsy. LeDuff made his bones as a reporter at the New York Times, contributing to its Pulitzer-winning series "How Race Is Lived in America," but when the staid Times became too restricting, he quit and moved to Detroit to work the city beat for the underdog Detroit News.
LeDuff knows the dark side of Detroit down to its grim corner taps ("cinderblock, cheap paneling, a jukebox, and a handful of wretches with faces of mud"), yet he holds sentimental hometown affection for his city despite recognizing that "it never was that good in the first place." With a reporter's tenacity, he digs into the details of Detroit's history of corrupt and incompetent leadership. His sharp tongue takes on a string of mayors and petty politicians on the take, "bejeweled and flamboyant... Little Richard of the cloth" preachers and the arrogant executives who destroyed the automotive goose that laid Detroit's golden egg. For LeDuff, the story of Detroit is "about angry people fighting and crying and snatching hold of one another trying to stay alive. It is about the future of America and our desperate efforts to save ourselves from it." Even if this metaphorical leap is a little over the top, Detroit: An American Autopsy is first-person reporting at its best. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.