They'd come to see the place as a blank slate, so debased and forgotten it could be remade. For the most idealistic of these pioneers, which is how many of the newcomers self-identified, Detroit might very well be the city of tomorrow, but of a wholly different sort than described above. And so they came, too, along with the Scandinavian academics, the neopastoralian agriculturalists, the deep-pocketed philanthropical organizations and the free-market ideologues and the fringe-left utopianiststhey all came. (Nov.Land speculators made the scene, too, as the new mayor, former Detroit Pistons basketball star Dave Bing, began to publicly acknowledge the need for the city to both shrink and radically reinvent itself, a pledge that urban-theorists, who had long regarded Detroit as the unsolvable math problem of their field, found tantalizing. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. From Henry Ford's auto and steel boom and the race riots of the 1960s and early %E2%80%9870s to the dark ages of widespread crack addiction and the current resurgence led by enterprising idealists, urban farmers, and DIY go-getters, Binelli offers a wildly compelling biography of a city as well as a profound commentary on postindustrial America. The author immersed himself in Motor City culture while writing the volume. A child of suburban Detroit, Binelli (Sacco and Vinzetti MustDie!) astonishes with spot-on research, fluid prose, and a discerning eye for the peculiar, including reports of early French frontiersmen and late %E2%80%9860s rock revolutionaries, the MC5. As fascinating as Detroit's current, tentative renaissance is, Binelli masterfully provides a broader story, a 300-year tour through the formerly wondrous and now wondrously devastated metropolis. Novelist and Rolling Stone contributing editor Binelli's first nonfiction book is a nuanced portrait of a once-great American industrial city that decades ago fell into decay, but which is, as of late, experiencing a ray of hope.
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