“It’s awful here, there is no other way to say it,” Charlie LeDuff writes in Detroit: An American Autopsy. Now that Detroit has filed for municipal bankruptcy, just how awful is a focus of national attention. But not only is Detroit dead, according to LeDuff’s title; the city was “never really that good.” From the moment when Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac—whom LeDuff derides as a “hustler” and “Detroit’s first dope dealer”—established the settlement to the city’s 1863 race riots to the depredations of the modern-day Motor City, LeDuff’s Detroit has been defined by racism, corruption, and greed.
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