Detroit is suffering terribly, and the author feels compelled to tell it like it is."ĭeadline Detroit presents a chapter titled "Lipstick and Laxatives." It deals principally with LeDuff's contacts with Monica Conyers, the "overfed buffoon" who was City Council president before going to prison for corruption, and Sam Riddle, whom LeDuff calls "a rakish con man" and who, LeDuff writes, described himself as Conyers' "pimp." Riddle also went to prison for corruption.Įxcerpted from DETROIT by Charlie LeDuff. 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. He explains his focus is on the city's residents.Charlie LeDuff's "Detroit: An American Autopsy," is available Thursday from The Penguin Press, its New York-based publisher. LeDuff argues against labeling his book as "ruin porn." That term refers to artists, photographers, and journalists focusing on abandoned buildings. He uses his reporting background and knowledge not just to address current issues in the city but to investigate what led to the city becoming what it is today. The full Fresh Air Interview can be heard below. Just to get to a park you had to cross two major boulevards, and I pictured my daughter at 14 with a halter top and blue mascara walking up and down Melrose, and my wife and I - she's also from Detroit - that we should just cash it in and come home so our daughter would have some roots and some structure and know her grandparents and her 20 cousins and her aunts and uncles, and I don't regret it in the least." "It was really a pretty cool life, but then we had the kid and I noticed something.
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