Detroit

February 6, 2012
Former Detroit News reporter Martelle (Blood Passion) vividly recounts the rise and downfall of a once-great city, from its origins as a French military outpost to protect fur traders and tame local Indian tribes, to the industrial giant known colloquially as Motown, and now when its “economy seized up like an engine run dry.” Founded by a French naval officer named Cadillac, the city became a vibrant river town with the Erie Canal’s opening, exporting both to the east and westward to Chicago. The 1855 opening of Lake Superior later expanded its postbellum shipping capacity and brought heavy industry. By 1929, about 10% of the city’s population of 1.6 million (the nation’s fourth largest) worked in automobile manufacturing. But a series of downturns ravaged the city: the 1973 OPEC oil embargo helped destroy the city’s auto-industry dominance, and drug-dealing gangs caused a murder rate that far outstripped New York’s. Today, says Martelle, Detroit has been abandoned by both the Big Three auto makers and most of its citizens, leaving primarily black residents, many uneducated, jobless, and poor. Martelle, also an occasional contributor to PW, offers an informative albeit depressing glimpse of the workings of a once-great city that is now a shell of its former self. Illus.; 10 b&w photos. Agent: Dystel and Goderich.

February 1, 2012
Former Detroit News journalist Martelle (The Fear Within: Spies, Commies and American Democracy on Trial, 2011, etc.) explores the troubled city where he once worked. The author shows how "no other American city has been gutted so deeply." From its peak in 1950, Detroit has lost 60 percent of its population and many of its employment opportunities, a situation caused in part by auto-industry decline, racism and anti-unionism. The industry decentralized across the country before globalizing, and most of Detroit's population, where it could, left for the suburbs. Now Mayor Dave Bing wants to raze abandoned neighborhoods and seal them off from the rest of the city. Martelle's case study combines history, economic evaluation and firsthand accounts from individual Detroiters. The city was settled by the French about 75 years before the United States was founded and was a center of diversified industry before it became the heart of the auto economy between 1910 and 1929. It was also a center of industrial unionism during the New Deal and was synonymous with the "arsenal of democracy" in World War II. The city's death warrant, writes Martelle, was signed when the industry converting back to auto production after the war failed to diversify. Now much of it is returning to meadows and pasture. A valuable biography sure to appeal to readers seeking to come to grips with important problems facing not just a city, but a country.

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February 15, 2012
Like a biography of a living person, this story has no conclusion. It offers instead a swift series of insights into a work in progress. Detroit is the quintessential example of an American city repeatedly built and rebuilt by the great American ideals of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and destroyed by the gravest American illsgreed, corruption, fear, and racism. Those who bemoan the city's current state, longing for the long-lost good old days, would be wise to learn the lessons of Detroit's history before they are doomed to repeat them, yet again. With a level but piercing journalist's eye, Martelle examines the life of the city as it grew from a French outpost into an American boomtown, and then into the Arsenal of Democracy as the automobile industry reengineered itself to supply the nation with the tanks, planes, and trucks of WWII. This unsentimental assessment is rich with cold, hard facts about those responsible for what Detroit became and what it is today, and one cannot avoid the parallels between the failures of the legendary titans of banking, industry, and politics and the city's calamitous decline. Equally evident is the courage and resilience of those who continue to build a positive future for the city.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)