The title and subtitle of this memoir – Detroit: An American Autopsy – warn readers that what follows will not be a series of soft-filter memories of childhood in the Motor City. Although LeDuff does tell the story of his own and his family's hardscrabble history in Detroit, his focus here is mostly on the disaster that his hometown has become.
Formerly a journalist with The New York Times, LeDuff made the somewhat surprising mid-life decision to move back to Detroit. Call it instinct, he says, "like a salmon needing to swim upstream because he is genetically encoded to do so." As a result, LeDuff found himself back where he grew up, exercising his journalistic skills in a town almost tragicomically rich in incompetence, corruption, and hopeless resignation: "an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and homes and forgotten people," he writes.
LeDuff's prose is angry, muscular, and stirring. He tells horrific stories of the malfeasance and neglect that dog the steps of all "the good people in this city" who are doing their best "to hold it together with gum and bailing wire." But what he's asking for is not pity but attention. Watch out, he warns. The missteps that have led to the collapse of Detroit are at work throughout the country, he suggests. "Go ahead and laugh at Detroit," he dares his readers. "Because you are laughing at yourself."
