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Detroit
- A Biography
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
When we think of Detroit, we think first of the auto industry and its slow, painful decline, then maybe the sounds of Motown, or the long line of professional sports successes. But economies are made up of people, and the effect of the economic downfall of Detroit is one of the most compelling stories in America.
Detroit: A Biography by journalist and author Scott Martelle is about a city that rose because of the most American of traits - innovation, entrepreneurship, and an inspiring perseverance. It’s about the object lessons learned from the city’s collapse, and, most prosaically, it’s about what happens when a nation turns its back on its own citizens.
The story of Detroit encompasses compelling human dimensions, from the hope it once posed for blacks fleeing slavery in the early 1800s and then rural Southern poverty in the 1920s, to the American Dream it represented for waves of European immigrants eager to work in factories bearing the names Ford, Chrysler, and Chevrolet. Martelle clearly encapsulates an entire city, past and present, through the lives of generations of individual citizens. The tragic story truly is a biography, for the city is nothing without its people.
Scott Martelle is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and author of three books of nonfiction. He has covered three presidential campaigns as well as postwar reporting from Kosovo. He is the cofounder of the Journalism Shop, a book critic, and an active blogger. He lives with his wife and children in California.
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On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the white beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture.
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Excellent book!
- By Eric Leafblad on 06-03-18
By: Claire Hartfield
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The Edge of Anarchy
- The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America
- By: Jack Kelly
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the US Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.
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Wow! every workingman should read.
- By Calemos on 01-18-20
By: Jack Kelly
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Five Points
- The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
- By: Tyler Anbinder
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.
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Great historical piece
- By Jim Braunstein on 08-19-19
By: Tyler Anbinder
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The Broken Heart of America
- St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
- By: Walter Johnson
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor Black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal.
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Sad & True,With Fascinating Facts of St.Louis Past
- By Ron G on 04-26-20
By: Walter Johnson
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High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
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Little mention of accountability of the people getting the housing
- By Steve D Renz on 05-15-18
By: Ben Austen
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American-Made
- The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work
- By: Nick Taylor
- Narrated by: James Boles
- Length: 20 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land. In 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created.
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The true spirit of America.
- By Helen on 07-01-08
By: Nick Taylor
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A History of America in Ten Strikes
- By: Erik Loomis
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers’ strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix).
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great read
- By Perscors on 03-17-19
By: Erik Loomis
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The South Side
- A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation
- By: Natalie Y. Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago native Natalie Moore shines a light on contemporary segregation on the South Side of Chicago through reported essays, showing the lives of these communities through the stories of people who live in them. The South Side shows the important impact of Chicago's historic segregation and the ongoing policies that keep it that way.
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Eyeopening!
- By Ladybug on 09-07-16
By: Natalie Y. Moore
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Divided Highways
- Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
- By: Tom Lewis
- Narrated by: Jim D. Johnston
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape.
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Lots of interesting facts. Poor narration
- By Richard on 06-01-21
By: Tom Lewis
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Boardwalk Empire
- The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City
- By: Nelson Johnson
- Narrated by: Joe Mantegna, Terence Winter (foreword)
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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From its inception, Atlantic City has always been a town dedicated to the fast buck, and this wide-reachinghistory offers a riveting account of its past 100 year, from the city's heyday as a Prohibition-era mecca of lawlessness to its rebirth as a legitimate casino resort in the modern era.
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The Unmasked History of Atlantic City
- By Steven Schuster on 08-07-10
By: Nelson Johnson
What listeners say about Detroit
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- dereksemos
- 08-19-24
Racism Corruption
I liked the history and birth of this city. I did not like the systemic racism that this city has in it.
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- Joshua Kim
- 06-10-12
Lessons from "Detroit: A Biography"
What would Detroit look like today if the University of Michigan had not moved from the city (after the university's founding in 1817) to Ann Arbor in 1837? Imagine what U of M's $8 billion endowment and 40,000 students would mean to the city today?
Would having a flagship research university in Detroit have allowed the city to follow a path closer to that of Pittsburgh, another formerly one industry town (steel instead of autos) that re-invented itself to a center of ED'S, MED'S, and FINANCE?
These and other questions are pondered in Scott Martelle's wonderful new book, Detroit: A Biography.
We keep reading about how it is cities that drive our economy by spurring innovation. Matt Ridely, in The Rational Optimist, talks about cities as places where "ideas go to have sex." Readers of Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City know that the world's future is an urban future, and that more people will move to cities in the 21st century than at any time in the history of the world.
The sub-title of Glaeser's book is "How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier." How then to explain Detroit?
Martelle, a long time Detroit resident and reporter (he currently lives in California) sets out to explain how Detroit went from one of our wealthier cities (with amongst the highest median incomes and highest rates of home ownership in the 1950s) to a place over one-third of residents live below the poverty line. What caused the greatest urban population crash in modern memory, with the number of Detroit city residents dropping from 1.85 million in 1950 to just over 700,000 today?
What can we learn from the story of Detroit? And is there a future for the Motor City? Martelle is stronger on the former question than the latter. He is articulate about the decisions the people of Detroit should have made to build on the city's industrial foundations. He is less certain about what Detroit can do now to turn things around.
Martelle ascribes the reasons for Detroit's fall primarily to the short-sighted and greedy decision making of the cities former elites. Rather than invest in industries outside of automobiles, politicians and corporate executives continuously doubled-down on cars. There is no Ford or G.M. University in Detroit. No Chrysler College. The failure to diversify is a lesson that other single industry towns should learn well.
Detroit: A Biography is an important addition to the growing literature on urbanism and innovation - and should be read by anyone thinking about which policies will be most effective in growing the U.S. economy in the 21st century.
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5 people found this helpful
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- David
- 05-19-20
Biased Review of Detroit
The author is quick to dismiss the reasoning for Detroit’s demise. Of course it had nothing to do with the corruption, high taxes, and over regulation of the city, making it impossible to start or maintain businesses in the city.
There are plenty of educated black and white families who would move back to Detroit. You’d have to attract developers to build gated communities with their own security. Block by block, you could build secure communities, so you could start refurbishing historic neighborhoods,
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1 person found this helpful
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- B. P. Sexton
- 12-17-15
Excellent biography of my home city
I learned a lot about the forces that forged Detroit into a powerhouse and the forces that lead Detroit into near ruins. I lived through some of the story and know how well the author captures the people on the ground of late 20th century Detroit. In the end I learned how and why life in Detroit in the 70's and & 80's was so hard. Highly recommended by a native
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2 people found this helpful
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- Timothy M. Mahoney
- 09-04-15
Thank you
I moved to Detroit 5 years ago and have finally gotten a chance to dig in and learn more about city. I Loved this book, I look forward to investigating Mayor Pingree and the Reuther brothers more in depth. This book covers a lot quickly, I found myself having to take breaks a lot as the areas racial problems were detailed, very tough to stomach. Overall, so appreciative that this book exists.
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1 person found this helpful
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- AngieGirl
- 01-23-22
A Must Read
Very informative and "eye opening". Great Narrator. Left me with a desire to revisit Detroit to see what has happened in the last decade.
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- Robert J. Goodsell
- 06-23-12
Narrator has never been near Detroit
What three words best describe William Hughes’s performance?
Doesn't know Detroit
Any additional comments?
The reader's mispronunciation of several Detroit area names is very distracting if you are familiar with the area: "Gratiot" should be pronounced "GRASH-ut", not "GRATHio". And it's "E-corse", not "e-CORSE", and "maCOMB" county, not "MAYcom". He also often puts emphasis in the wrong places in sentences.
The book itself often diverges into huge amounts of largely irrelevant detail, especially distracting when listening.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Tim B.
- 05-14-12
A Very Interesting Book about Detrot's History!
Would you consider the audio edition of Detroit to be better than the print version?
This was a great book especially in the beginning. I got lots of interesting facts and figures. I felt that the end of the book was not nearly the quality as the beginning. I felt it skimmed over much the "1948: 250th Anniversary!" It did give some great information on the "Henry Ford Era" but again not enough; and it didn't seem to have enough information on the revival and the 2008: 300th Anniversay!" I am glad I read the book, but it seemed to be hastened during the end!
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The Beginning History and the facts and details - the civil rights of Detroit was also interesting for me!
Have you listened to any of William Hughes’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Nope
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Early African America struggles.
Any additional comments?
It was a great book in the beginning!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mgroovy78
- 10-27-21
good read for basic understanding
good read but a bit of miss pronounced cities and street names. enjoyed it nonetheless
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jasim
- 12-28-20
Detroit: Americas Troy
This book analyzes the life and times of the City of Detroit. It describes the the early settlement of the land and how it was built, and how endured hardships for hundreds of years.
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1 person found this helpful