Binelli then traces the city's ascent, from its foundation in 1701 as a French fur-trading post, well situated between two of the Great Lakes, to the self-mythologising "Motor City" of Detroit's brief heyday. Again, the tone is too quick and breezy: "… After an eventual negotiated peace with [chief] Pontiac, nothing much interesting happened in Detroit for the next thirty or so years …" In modern nonfiction, the slick, conversational, summarising style of Malcolm Gladwell's influential bestsellers has a lot to answer for.
The book handles Detroit's decline better. In 1967, after a final, unsustainable manufacturing boom based on war production, the city suffered riots, "at that point, the worst in US
history". Forty-three people died, nearly 3,000 buildings burned, and soldiers with tanks were sent out on to the streets, where gun battles took place that seemed a terrifying echo of what was happening in Vietnam. For some of Detroit's critics, many of them relatively prosperous white people who have left since, 1967 is the city's point of no return, the moment when black Detroit unthinkingly trashed its own backyard. But Binelli tells a more nuanced and persuasive story. Both white flight to suburbs beyond the city limits and the decay of the local car industry, he writes, had begun a decade or more before the riots. Despite – or perhaps because of – a reforming 60s mayor, the white, liberal Jerry Cavanagh, compellingly portrayed here as one of a succession of charismatic but seemingly doomed civic leaders, African-American grievances had reached boiling point. To this day, when many older black Detroiters talk about 1967, writes Binelli, "The word uprising replaces riot."
The city is now 85 per cent African-American, "run entirely by a black political elite". Binelli is a 42-year-old Italian-American with left-liberal leanings, and is firm but fair in documenting this elite's shortcomings and extreme administrative challenges. Yet he is more interested in portraiture than polemic, and the book's second half settles down into a series of delicately-drawn studies of life among the ruins. Defiant, isolated homeowners sit on their porches, surrounded by grassy emptiness, as if Detroit is turning into the rural South many of its original inhabitants came from. A bare-bones fire service is doggedly maintained in Highland Park, "the Detroit of Detroit", a separate, even frailer settlement surrounded by the city. Firemen work from tents and a trailer, set up inside a warehouse in an overgrown industrial park, "the former site of Chrysler's world headquarters".
