But if you’re looking for slices of life with a whiff of rancid meat, LeDuff is your man. 'If you’re looking for the definitive history of a city that showed the world how to make cars and soul music, this isn’t the place. It is about angry people fighting and crying and snatching hold of one another trying to stay alive.'Ī Boston Globe reviewer calls the book 'morbidly funny,' adding: It is about corrupt politicians and a collapsing newspaper.

'It is a book about family and cops and and criminals and factory workers. LeDuff, a reporter for Fox 2 Detroit, writes in the prologue: But his hometown had changed, he writes, having turned into 'an industrial sarcophagus' and 'an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and homes and forgotten people.' The 304-page book is an honest and raw memoir of LeDuff's 2008 return to metro Detroit, his hometown, after working as a reporter for the New York Times for 12 years. Detroit: An American Autopsy is 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.Charlie LeDuff's 'Detroit: An American Autopsy,' is available Thursday from The Penguin Press, its New York-based publisher. 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.

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. 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. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest.

Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. One lucky person will win a copy at the ELGL dessert social at the NCCCMA Winter Seminar tomorrow! See a description of the book below.Īn explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity-from Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist Charlie LeDuffīack in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. We will dive into this thought-provoking investigation of Detroit’s decline over the next seven weeks, ending with a Twittersation on March 27 at 12 noon EST to discuss what we’ve read. Join ELGL members in reading New York Times Bestseller, Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff.

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