Detroit: An American Autopsy

This is a review for the audiobook version of _Detroit: An American Autopsy_ by Charlie LeDuff. It’s a long review, so the short summary is that it was painful and tragic, but I’m glad listened to it, and I give it five stars.Usually when I type up a book review for a nonfiction book, I’ll note whether the book had an index, bibliography, footnotes or endnotes, and I’ll type up the table of contents. However, because this review is for an audiobook, I have no idea if LeDuff’s book included any of those in the print version.Also, because it’s an audiobook, the reader plays an important part in the listener’s experience. And I have to commend Eric Martin for his voice acting abilities. He creates distinctive voices for the various people who appear in the story. In particular, there’s an exchange of text messages between a politician and his mistress which LeDuff recounts, and Martin reads. The texts oscillate between a mistress who writes grammatically correct and quite descriptive erotica, and a politician whose texts are short and often one or two words and are usually profanities. Martin not only captures the abrupt changes in tone and erudition with his voice, but even manages to have a undertone like he’s looking at the listener and saying “Can you believe this? I’m not sure which is more ridiculous, that they wrote this, that I’m reading it, or that I’m being paid to read it.”And now to address the text of the book. It’s a painful and tragic book, but also inspiring in its own way. I’m glad I listened to it.Charlie LeDuff is a journalist and reporter who grew up in the Detroit area then left to work in other places. I haven’t read his other books, but in _Detroit: An American Autopsy_ LeDuff comes across as almost a stereotype from decades past — the journalist who sees journalism as a craft that “afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted,” and who goes into each interview with politicians thinking “how is this lying jerk lying to me now?”At the start of the book, LeDuff leaves his job in California to move him and his family back to Detroit and work for one of the small local newspapers. Some parts of Charlie LeDuff’s family go back in the Detroit area multiple generations and most of his family still lives in the area. In the second half of the book, LeDuff looks into his own family history and discovers that one branch of his family has some recent African American ancestry, and LeDuff marvels at how one of his grandfathers went from “mulatto” or “negro” or “black” in government documentation in the American south to “white” in Detroit. LeDuff’s family have their own tragedies, including the death of LeDuff’s sister, and then the death of the sister’s daughter. At one point, LeDuff goes to an aunt’s funeral and is almost creeped out by the ordinariness of his aunt’s funeral with the quiet grieving and respectful silence, because he is far more used to family funerals which include meltdowns, breakdowns, and drunken fights.LeDuff interweaves the history of Detroit as well as his own personal and family history into the book. Detroit was founded by a French man with the name of Cadillac (although that may not have been his actual name) to trade in beaver skins and other furs to send back to France. The name Detroit comes from the French word “detroit” which means “strait” and describes its location as being on a strait of Lake Erie. As time went on and various wars were fought, Detroit was ceded to Britain and then to the United States. There was always a lot of trade in Detroit.Detroit has also always had diverse ethnic groups, often with tension between groups. This continued when it grew explosively from 1900-1930, with immigration from southern Europe, eastern Europe, the southern U.S. and areas of the Appalachian mountains in the U.S., all people coming to get jobs in heavy industry, the auto industry and defense industries. And that’s in addition to the descendants of earlier French and English settlers who were already living there. I was quite surprised to hear that a large percentage of the KKK was based in Michigan and Detroit in the early 20th century. There were two large race riots in Detroit in 1943 and 1967 which were so severe Detroit was occupied by armed forces of the U.S. federal government to end the riots.Even before I listened to this book, I’d read multiple magazine articles over the years about the unique challenges Detroit faces today. Its population has shrunk by over half since the 1950s. This by itself is fairly unique for a large city to deal with. But Detroit has also seen most of its large industrial companies close or shrink and the blue collar wages from the existing companies have gone down precipitously, and many of its middle class residents have moved to the suburbs or out of the area entirely. So Detroit has seen its population and its amount of tax revenue per capita both decline dramatically. But its city borders and the miles of city streets, water pipes, sewer pipes and other utilities that all have to be maintained haven’t gone down.These would be difficult challenges for any city with competent management, but much of what LeDuff documents is the corruption of Detroit’s city officials. There are many people down at the working level, such as police officers and firefighters, who work hard and try their best. But at some point in the city’s administrative structure, political connections and skill at office politics overtake any skill, scruples, or experience.LeDuff talks to homicide detectives whose budget has been cut so deeply that they if they have a department car, it leaks inside and has water puddling on the floor, and in some cases homicide detectives have to take the city bus to go to a crime scene. There is great news about what a great job the police department has done in reducing the murder rate, but the homicide detectives are seething with rage because they know the actual murder rate is not any better at all. There are unsolved cases that will remain unsolved because the police department’s budget doesn’t include enough money in the budget to actually investigate and solve the crimes. But when LeDuff writes a news story about it, the detective who talked to him is put under such pressure the detective has to retract his statement. And after that, the detectives still meet with LeDuff to talk about their frustration and anger at the system, but only in off-the-beaten path dive bars and cheap diners and only after looking around the establishment to make sure there is no one to snitch on them for talking to a reporter.LeDuff has a special appreciation for firefighters and the culture of firefighters, seeing them as the spiritual descendants of the brave and sometimes slightly crazy cowboys of the Old West. As with the police, LeDuff finds the firefighters actually working in the stations and running into burning buildings to be mostly good people trying to do good while working without nearly enough funding and equipment. But the people who head the fire department for the entire city are not that way. One of stories that LeDuff comes back to repeatedly is a firefighter who was a mentor to many others and who died putting out a fire in an abandoned building. As LeDuff researches the story and writes articles for the newspaper he works at, his name and face become known and he finds himself personally escorted out of the public building housing the head bureaucrats of the fire department.LeDuff realizes that similar to the police department, if he reports on what the firefighters are telling him, all that happens is those firefighters get told they can either publicly recant or be fired. LeDuff promises to find out where the rats are officially. So he looks up as much of the city fire department’s budget as he can, files Freedom Of Information Act requests for the rest, and when the fire department says he can only view the documents in person, during regular hours, with a city employee present, LeDuff sits in a small room for several days going through stacks and stacks of receipts and reports. LeDuff then confronts the fire chief with his findings, which include many millions of dollars in construction projects which seem to have no actual construction ever done on them. The fire department officials coolly explain that sometimes projects get started and then canceled, but LeDuff counters with the times that’s happened when the unspent money is never put back into the budget. And then LeDuff brings up the approved and spent construction projects on buildings that don’t exist or that haven’t been active fire stations in several decades. LeDuff writes it all up for his newspaper, with facts and figures and proof, and it gets published, and then nothing happens. (LeDuff says that as a result of all this, some of the firefighters thanked him for the work he’d been doing researching and publicizing this; he said it was only the second time he’d had public officials thank him for his work as a reporter, and the previous time it was the firefighters he was reporting on at Ground Zero after the 9/11 bombings.)There are a lot more stories like that in _Detroit: An American Autopsy_. LeDuff talks to officials, he talks to people accused or under indictment, he talks to criminals, he talks to victims, he talks to grieving family members. There are a lot of things I remember reading about in national news, but without the context and details LeDuff supplies. I remember the hopeful articles about new Detroit Mayor David Bing, who was new to politics, a famous sports star and successful business owner, and someone who genuinely wanted to turn Detroit around. LeDuff points out that when Bing was elected mayor, only fourteen percent of the electorate showed up to vote, Bing’s company was on its way to bankruptcy when he decided to run for mayor, and for all the good intentions Bing expressed, he kept on most of the career bureaucrats who continued to do as much damage as they ever had.LeDuff also talks about the mosque which was accused of being a Sunni Islam terrorist cell (I remembered reading about that too), and explains that to the neighbors, it was a bunch of young black men who were lost and used to a criminal life and who were trafficking in stolen goods and intimidating the neighborhood.At the same time federal officials got into a firefight that resulted in the head of the mosque being shot twenty times while cornered in the back of a semi trailer full of stolen goods, the underwear bomber from across the Atlantic (who was on a federal watch list) was allowed to buy a ticket to fly to the United States and pay with cash only and to board the plane. LeDuff dryly notes that had the underwear bomber actually gotten his underwear bomb to go off, it might have exploded while the plane was above Detroit, and the wreckage might have fallen on Detroit, and might not have hit anybody because according to some estimates Detroit is 40% empty.LeDuff does actually make some small differences, getting attention to a neglected case here, helping a grieving grandmother get a chance to bury her granddaughter’s ashes there.But, at the end of the book, while reporting on a trial of a case where the accused should have been in jail for prior crimes, but that previous case was abruptly closed by a judge who was notorious for closing cases prematurely when she wanted to go on vacation but she still got reelected because she came from a family of judges and politicians and therefore had enough name recognition to get reelected, LeDuff finally gives up on Detroit entirely and also leaves. He has written up his most recent story covering the deaths that were the results of people under trial for criminal acts being set free because of the prematurely closed cases from the courtroom of the judge who didn’t like working full days and didn’t like missing her vacations, and his own employer sat on the story for a few days then published a highly modified and softened version of it, because it’s a judge likely to get reelected from a family of judges likely to get reelected, and that newspaper doesn’t want to rock the boat as much as that. So LeDuff calls a friend in maintenance, gets a large waste bin to his desk, pushes everything off his desk into the waste bin, and leaves.What does a person do when confronted with people who are getting killed and are killing themselves, but aren’t yet miserable enough to want to risk change? What do you do when someone is brave enough to speak up and say the truths that no one want to admit are true, and the response from everyone else is “it’s no use” or “don’t even bother” or “nothing’s going to change”?Most places aren’t as bad as Detroit; but Detroit also wasn’t always as bad as Detroit. For me, _Detroit: An American Autopsy_ was a reminder that I don’t have to try and set the world on fire, but I do have to be willing to state my own principles and be willing to stand up for them, because if I don’t, then how can I expect anyone else to do so? Because of that, it’s a painful and tragic book, but I’m still glad I listened to it, and I give it five stars.

During the two years Charlie Le Duff spent working as a reporter for the Detroit News, the city was in terrible trouble. It had hit bottom, with its 1950s population of almost 2 million having sunk to under 700,000, leaving its neighborhoods full of abandoned houses; financial insolvency ultimately led to the nation's largest ever municipal bankruptcy. The stories in this compelling book are familiar to me, as I too am a Detroiter.IN THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL ~~~ LeDuff is a gifted writer and he captures the essence of the Motor City in this surprisingly candid tale of corruption and despair. It is not just the story of Detroit, but also the story of Charlie LeDuff. He is personally involved in the unearthing of a frozen man in an abandoned book warehouse, he details his up-close-and-personal meeting with a seductive Monica Conyers, wife of long-serving Congressman John Conyers, who was on the City Council before landing in jail because she took money from city suppliers. LeDuff breaks bread with fire fighters in decrepit firehouses, commiserating with friends of a firemanr killed on the job, and he is with the grandmother of the little girl accidently shot by police as they raided the wrong apartment while crews were filming for a reality TV show, driving her to the cemetery with the ashes of this innocent victim. He is in the middle of everything.I'd be tempted to think LeDuff belongs to the "true if interesting" school of journalism from some of his exploits, but I know from my own experience living and working in the city and researching my own book (I am the author of  A Guide to Post-Industrial Detroit: Unconventional Tours of an Urban Landscape ) that he has generally provided a true portrait of the city.THE "MOTOR CITY" - THEN AND NOW ~~~ He has few good words for General Motors or Chrysler and writes an amusing account of the trip to Washington DC the auto moguls made in private jets to beg for handouts from the federal government. They were sent back home by our Washington legislators, and returned driving their own vehicles, although one exec confided to LeDuff that for the trip home, he used the symbolically correct vehicle only as far as the airport.LeDuff can hold up the auto companies to ridicule since he does not come from a family raised on auto industry money, as I did. My Dad worked in an auto factory for over 40 years before retiring with a nice pension and health care. He was from an immigrant family and started work at age 16 in the foundry at the Buick factory in Flint. He never worked anywhere else, eventually moving to operating a machine that stamped fenders, then getting an easier job as he got old.The UAW got lots of goodies for auto workers in those days, but that is over now. If the auto execs do not command respect any more, neither do the union bosses. My father's story is from an earlier generation, Tom Brocaw's "Greatest Generation," but that was the last generation for whom a job in an auto factory meant lifetime employment and paid retirement. (My father has passed away, but my mother is 95 years old and still getting his GM pension).HIS OWN STORY, REFLECTING HIS CITY ~~~ Charlie LeDuff's family seems to be as troubled as the city he writes about. Some of the most moving parts of the book are when he writes about his own family, his brothers and their struggles trying to survive in a poor economy and a city whose major industry, like the city itself, fell into bankruptcy. He tells us about his sister, Nicole, who he describes as a "streetwalker," but whom he obviously loves (or "loved" -- she is dead). His sister gave birth to a child at a young age and he tells us about this girl, his niece who wanted to visit him when he moved back to Detroit from New York City. But he never did invite her over and she apparently was too much like her mother; she also is dead. LeDuff writes movingly about his own regrets over these deaths which seem to fit into the fabric of tragedy that plays out every day in the city of Detroit. He weaves the personal stories into the tales of those he meets as a reporter.NO "RACE CARD" HERE ~~~ LeDuff generally avoids the highly charged subject of race relations in Detroit. The truth is the city has a long, sad history of segregation and poor relations between blacks and whites. I was 22-years old when the 1967 riot got going just a mile or so from the apartment where I was living with my new husband. We lived in one of two all-white apartment buildings in a black neighborhood. We survived a week of constant gunshot fire, National Guard tanks rolling down our street, and the sight, seen from the roof of our building, of fires burning in all directions. But black people did not attack white people, and this riot was about a mostly white police department harassing a mostly black population (take note, people of Ferguson, Missouri).But going back further in time to 1943 when blacks and whites DID attack and kill each other and further back still to 1925 when a black doctor moved into a white neighborhood and fired on a mob about to storm his house and ended up in court, with Clarence Darrow defending him, and you can wonder if all the racial wounds are healed. I think we all know the answer to that.WE'RE ALL MONGRELS HERE ~~~ LeDuff examines his own ancestry, the LeDuff side, and we find it comes, not from Detroit's own French heritage, but from Louisiana Creole and a Mulatto ancestor who transformed himself from black to white by moving to Detroit. Many light-skinned people of mixed race did this, but once upon a time, you were considered black if you had the tiniest bit of black in you. So Charlie LeDuff: a bit of black, a bit of Native American, and you get ... what? An American! Perhaps the author's own racial confusion has kept him away from putting this most explosive of subjects under consideration. It's a big topic that would require another book.Not that LeDuff remains neutral on the subject of harassment and discrimination and he certainly does not take the side of the white capitalists who tend to run things. He writes of disagreeing with the viewpoint of his bosses at the Detroit News, from which he resigned. (But why did he then go to work for the right-wing Fox TV channel following the publication of this book?)LeDuff points out how the city's impoverishment, caused in part by dishonest politicians who robbed the city coffers, affects people still living there. Firemen without the equipment they need, police with non-working radios, neighborhoods full of trash that's never picked up, street lights that don't work. If you're looking for sad stories, Detroit is full of them.HERE'S WHAT I THINK ~~~ The good news is that, since he wrote this book, things are getting better. The bankruptcy (In My Humble Opinion) has been a blessing, with the city shedding billions of dollars in debt while preserving resources needed to improve city services. A new mayor acknowledges and understands the massive problems, a white man elected by a black city for his willingness to fix things. Lots of dangerous buildings have been demolished and many others are being sold to people who have a use for them. The police are responding faster now to emergencies and the city has a police chief so far untouched by scandal. Parts of the city, especially Midtown, look far better than they did when I first came to live in Detroit back in the 1960s.When you hit bottom, there's no place to go but up and Detroit will prove its motto ("We hope for better... it will rise from the ashes") and rise from the ashes of arson, crime and corruption and I believe it is doing that now. Charlie LeDuff's book is an entertaining, funny, and informative read, but it is already out-of-date, a portrait in time of a living city, a time that is passing.

Being one of those odd types who are fascinated by urban decay, this was a must read for me. I was familiar with LeDuff through his video clips for Fox TV that can be found on Youtube, so did not anticipate a book written in classical prose. He's whole demeanour is that of someone brought up in the gritty environs of Detroit. Hard drinking, hard smoking, and using a vernacular so American, the book could really do with a glossary for Europeans. Through his anecdotes, he paints a very vivid picture of what goes on in a barely functioning city, although one does wonder if things haven't been a little embroidered here and there. It would not be the first time he has been accused of such in his career.A dry historical analysis of Detroit is never going to give the best account, and I welcomed the view through his personal perspective, which struck me as pretty well sorted. He does not, for example, skate around the race issue just to remain "politically correct". He speaks as he finds. This was a book I didn't to put down until I'd finished, which did not take long. It's not a hefty tome. Thoroughly recommended.

This book is a great read. Each chapter is just the right length you always want to read on that bit longer and LeDuff's writing style is very fluent.I was fascinated with the urban decay of Detroit and this book provided the insight to the daily lives of people living there. From the firemen with no screen doors to the corrupt politicians accepting bribes and even to LeDuff's sister and niece.LeDuff's niece offers to come over and babysit but he refuses the offer as he reckons she'll just move in and drink all his liquor and eat his food then leave weeks later. Little side-stories like this build a picture of a broken, down-on-their-luck Detroit population hoping for a better future.The only city in America to be occupied by the army three times...read this book to find out why.

A good read for anyone seeking to understand the current political crisis of the western world. Real information is a good palliative against "fake news"

Just started this book and already I am hooked. Great for anyone who has an interest in the history of detroit and the transformation over the years.

This book explores the death of the American dream and the rot that set in with the virtual annihilation of the the local economy and the American car manufacturing industry. A city is stripped of its economy and the majority of the people letting the moral compass spin as crime becomes the norm and the arsonists work in hand with the fire department.