Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At some point when I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to be a reporter. I'm sure this was a reaction to too many detective novels, but at the time it seemed like a perfect fit: I would be kind of like a detectives, uncovering crime and corruption lurking in the seedy underbelly of the city, without having to walk a beat, get shot at, etc. It was a revelation, a clear path for me to follow, and of course, I told my parents about it. I think it might have been the only time* when my parents flat out laughed at me. "You hate cities," they pointed out, "you don't like talking to people." Although, I probably pouted about it at the time, they were not wrong, and I am tremendously glad I found a different path...
I like to think, though, that if I had been temperamentally suited to being a journalist, I would have been something like Charlie Le Duff. Fearless, determined, able to use a mixture of wits, detective power, and sneakiness, to get at the root cause of the ills in america.
There are some problems with this book. There are some factual inconsistencies****. LeDuff has a weird perspective on race and privilege that ranges from vaguely insensitive to downright offensive.
But overall this is a fascinating read about how greed, incompetence, and corruption (from all sides: absenteeist workers, incompetent executives, and corrupt politicians) can destroy an empire, and how the honest, hardworking people at all levels suffer as a result.
* This includes a surprisingly lengthy tolerance of my declaration that I was going to be a veterinarian. This was a clear rebellion against my parents no pets rule, but their forbearance was impressive**.
** The veterinarian stratagem came to a spectacular close when my mother (the most stringent enforcer of the pet ban) strongly suggested that if I wanted to be a veterinarian I really ought to examine and dissect the dead squirrel that had been hit by a car in our neighborhood, and I squeamishly refused.***
*** Never play poker with my mother.
**** According to the epilogue (uh, spoiler, i guess?) the city executive gets fired for covering up theft of property, but I thought the who reason Charlie Le Duff was pissed at him was because he was overly zealously pursuing the theft of property, while simultaneously mismanaging the departments resources?
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