Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis (Hardcover) by Mark Binelli

from SamSattler

The city of Detroit has quite a history. Once it was America's boomtown, a beacon of opportunity that, for decades, attracted countless job seekers from less prosperous regions of the country. Now, Detroit is the stereotypical representative of everything that could possibly go wrong in an Americ...

from bezoar44

Detroit City is the Place to Be offers a thoroughly enjoyable tour of Detroit and its overwhelming problems, circa 2010. Binelli is a native who moved away to New York, then back long enough to research and write this book, before apparently returning to the Big Apple. The writing is quick-witted...

from dirac

I consider Detroit to be my home city though I have not even lived in Michigan for 20 years. When I go back, I like to go downtown but I go as an interloper. Here, Mr. Binelli lived in the city for a year, meeting residents, politicians, artists and gathered a story of where Detroit was, where it...

from vasquirrel

I forget which news outlet first reported that the city of Detroit had become a dumping ground for the bodies of homicide victims from other areas and a wasteland of abandoned properties, but I remember saying "Huh, what?!" Somehow, I had missed the massive decline of this storied and iconic Amer...

from dandelionroots

Discusses the struggles and triumphs of the past and present Detroit. Current efforts such as urban gardening, right-sizing (shrinking the city by incentivizing people living in virtually abandoned "neighborhoods" to move into areas that can be more efficiently and economically maintained and ser...