Explore the Fascinating History and Resurgence of Detroit: A Guide to America's Comeback City

Kotti1: Entertaining and informative book. Gives a broad understanding of D's history, as well as of the underlying and recent problems. As it was covers the subject up to 2011/2012 only, the reader interested in the current situation needs other sources or first hand experience.

Germany on Dec 29, 2016

j hager: me and my students loved the book, it's a great read and highly informative. Binelli is a great writer, and Detroit still a place to be.

Germany on Jul 15, 2016

Sharon Charters: good book but the LeDuff one was more interesting

Canada on Jun 28, 2016

Stephen: It was for my partner for Christmas. She's from Detroit and is interested in self sufficiency. She's really enjoying the book.

United Kingdom on Jan 21, 2016

jm: good read

United Kingdom on Feb 12, 2015

Wayne A. Smith: Binelli is a good writer and has produced an interesting if breezy overview of efforts to make something of Detroit.

The author, a Detroit native, moves back to the city to chronicle the people who hope to reinvigorate what is arguably America's most desperate urban area. This is not "ruin porn", as apparently people call profiles of Detroit that focus on the mayhem, arson, desolation and abandonment that have bled a once booming metropolis of over 2,000,000 people down to today's count of 700,000 inhabitants. The desolation, failures, and rotten characters are a part of the story, but they form the backdrop for a book that recounts Detroit's rise, fall and present state of hope a midst the hopelessness many feel for the city.

The reader gets early chapters on the carving out of the wilderness of the French trading post that became Detroit, its rise as an industrial center and peak as the home and production site of automobiles. The movement of autos first to the suburbs, then to the South and overseas, social unrest in a bi-racial metropolis, the 1967 riots and corrupt urban politics each acted as accelerants upon each other, fueling an unhealthy urban environment...

United States on Feb 11, 2013

Alan F. Sewell: Author Mark Binelli tells a well-written and engaging story of America's most maligned city. He explains his purpose in writing the book:

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For people of my generation and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder of the best having ended a long time ago. We held no other concept of Detroit but as a shell of its former self. ... Would my kids one day grow up thinking the same thoughts about America as a whole, about my ponderous tales of cold war victories and dot-com booms....A malaise spreading through the rest of the country....

After I moved back to the city, people I met in dozens of different contexts described Detroit as "the Wild West." Meaning, it's basically lawless. Meaning, land is plentiful and cheap. Meaning, now, as the frontier quite literally returns to the city-- trees growing out of tops of abandoned buildings! wild pheasants circling the empty lots!-- so, too, has the metaphorical frontier, along with the notion of "frontier spirit."

...just as Greenland might be called ground zero of the broader climate crisis, Detroit feels like ground zero for ... what, exactly? The end of the American way...

United States on Dec 17, 2012