"Detroit" by Charlie LeDuff (2013)

What killed Detroit? The saying used to be “As goes GM, so goes the nation.” If that expression is true, then we are all in trouble. Journalist Charlie LeDuff, formerly of the New York Times, returns home to the city where he grew up to work for the local newspaper, a far cry from the job he held in New York. He hopes to cover what may be the biggest story in America; the death a of a once great city; a place where Henry Ford began the $5 work day, and ended with the loss of the auto industry to the foreign market, before falling victim to the recession of 2008.

Looking back through some of Detroit’s history paints a picture of the city which became home to hundreds of thousands of workers during the great migration from the south. These people arrived seeking a better life, only to find themselves living in the worst end of town, while relegated to a life of factory work. For several generations that was the expected “norm”, but once the Unions got involved, with their demands for high pay and good benefits; even for the unskilled; the industry fell to the complacency which often accompanies the assumption that things will always remain the same.

Why go to college when you can sweep the factory floor for $18 an hour? Why prepare for any other work when you have a virtual guarantee of lifelong employment, and a retirement which meets all your needs? This is the thinking which allowed the people of Detroit to be taken down by crooked politicians, corrupt labor leaders, and the apathy of the people themselves as they watched their world literally crumble about them.

When the city went broke many of the municipal services we take for granted fell by the wayside. Garbage went uncollected, and fires raged out of control as people; unemployed and without hope; set fire to the vacant houses around them. The firefighters have no equipment which hasn't been damaged, or stolen to be sold as scrap, and even the federal bailout money which was supposed to help save the dying city, was pilfered by a cast of characters who rival those in Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.” The saying in Detroit is that sometimes when there is a crime, the people call the police. And as if to return the favor, sometimes the Police show up.

The authors brother Billie had a job as a writer of sub-prime mortgages, part of what brought the whole nation to its knees, just as the easy credit extended by GMAC in order to make cars affordable to all, did back in the 1920’s. The car was the precursor to the mindset that begat the housing bubble of the early 2000’s. Billie ends up working at a screw factory for $8 per hour, even as he loses the home he, himself, once wrote the sub-prime mortgage on.

Detroit itself, once home to an ambitious and upwardly mobile workforce has become the emblem of what went wrong with America in the heady years after World War Two had come to a close. Lacking any real competition from abroad, we became fat and lazy, allowing crooked politicians to lead us down the path to our own destruction.

With the bailout of Detroit’s “Big Three” comes a great lesson in greed and corruption. Arriving in Washington aboard their corporate jets to beg for a Federal bailout, they return home empty handed, seemingly at a loss as to what went wrong. They had arrived in style, but with no concrete plan to present to Congress. They were shocked when they were turned down for the bailout money, returning to Detroit to regroup. Only after returning to Washington; in hybrid automobiles; would they receive any attention at all.

Detroit’s “hip-hop” Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, presided over much of the city’s decay. And when he was caught and sentenced to prison, he served 99 days and when released returned to live with his mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, a United States Congresswoman and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

As the factories and plants closed, the properties remained vacant, becoming a place for the homeless and drug addicted to seek shelter. The description of men playing ice hockey in the basement of one of these vacant buildings is incredulous, especially when they discover a body at the bottom of an elevator shaft frozen in ice. He was there for months before anyone reported him. His name was Johnnie Lewis Redding, second cousin to the great singer Otis.

And, as the city burns, there is no money left for schools, leaving the children to bring their own toilet paper to class. Books are a rarity, and the ones in use are hopelessly outdated. What kind of future awaits these children, who are daily accosted by drug dealers and cannot even play safely outdoors anymore?

Mr. LeDuff has done an extraordinary job at chronicling the demise of a once great metropolis. The scariest part of the book however, is that this is the blueprint of what is happening to America all over, as we watch our jobs; and futures; being shipped all over the world, leaving nothing behind for the average working class person.

When the authors brother Billie moves to a rented property, after losing his home, he packs his belongings in boxes stamped “Made in China” as he wonders aloud, “Don’t we make anything here anymore?” This is a book which will astonish you as it paints a picture of what our national future may look like under the leadership of the incompetent. The real pity is that we are the ones who choose them.

Not only has the author written a book about the fiscal failure of one of the nation's former leading cities, he has also given us a glimpse of what made Detroit the great metropolis she once was. And along the way, he makes some startling discoveries about his own family. Sometimes, while confronting the communal present, we find a mirror image of our individual pasts. A very revealing, and well written book.

"Original Gangster" by Frank Lucas

From the very first page this book keeps you riveted to every word. The story opens in 1936 North Carolina on the morning that three white men, Ku Klux Klan members, come to the Lucas home and kill his 13 year old cousin, Obadiah. The crime was typical, he had looked at a white woman. For this, they blew his head off.

What follows is the real life story of Frank Lucas, notorious for decades as the reigning boss of the drug trade in Harlem; protege to "Bumpy" Johnson, the Al Capone of Harlem. This is a rare and fascinating look behind the African-American organized crime scene from the 1940's through the 1970's. It included drugs, gambling and prostitution. Flavored with many underworld characters, among them "Detroit Red", later to be known as Malcolm X, the book takes in politics, the code of the streets and the corruption that allows it all to exist, unhindered.

The book begins with a short dedication, admonishing the reader to stay in school, get a degree and not to follow in the path of it's author. For anyone who has seen the film "American Gangster" with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, this book will seem familiar. It should. That film was a synopsis of the life of Frank Lucas and his relationship with Bumpy Johnson, his mentor. This book offers so much more. This is the real story, told by the man who lived it. No special effects, just the words, plainly written to chronicle a life spent hustling to the top.

Written a few years after the release of the movie, the reader cannot help but wonder if Mr. Lucas saw the film and then decided to write the book to set the record straight. I believe he did.

" A Pickpockets Tale" by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

For lovers of old New York, the years 1850- 1910 represent a special era in the city's history. There was the great influx of Irish, German and Jewish immigrants. There were the Draft Riots of 1863, the Great Blizzard in the 1880's, the list goes on and on. There has always been a fascination with the past in New York, particularly if you lived there and walked the streets. You can sometimes feel a sense of that history as you look at the old brickwork, or the alleyways, which were once dangerous and unhealthy places. The ghost of Jacob Riis hangs heavily over these scenes. His documentary photos of New York in the late 19th Century speak to us from every image.

But here is a different tale, and an unusual one. Timothy J. Gilfoyle has authored an authentic and detailed account of life in New York during these years. He has done so in a very unusual way - through the diary of one of Old New York's nost notorious criminals, George Washington Appo.

Born on July 4th, 1856 to a Chinese father and an Irish mother, he was 3 years old when he was orphaned. His father was in jail for murder and his mother was dead. Originally placed with a foster family of longshoreman in Donovan's Lane, he quickly became acclimated to a life of crime in the notorious Five Points area.

Apparently he taught himself to read while peddling newspapers at age 12. This was an era where you had to fight for your corner, or lose it. He branched off to picking pockets and by age 14 was arrested and placed aboard a prison ship for juveniles.

This is a no holds barred look at life in New York during some of it's most formative years as an emerging metropolis. Appo kept a diary which is surprisingly well written and informative of the times in which it takes place. His descriptions of the Mott Street opium dens is fascinating. If I ever get back to New York for a visit I am going to number 4 Mott Street just to look at the building and remember some of the things I've read in this book.

At times, Appo made several hundred dollars a night picking pockets. He also gambled and smoked opium. He was shot several times and spent many years in prison. Eventually he wound up in Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he met his father after more than 20 years! And yes, his father was also an inmate.

More than just a book about crime, this is a valuable resource on the social makeup of the times. African, European and Asian immigrants lived side by side in some of the most deplorable conditions. This made for strange alliances. Inter-marraige between these disparate groups was not uncommon.

Using Mr. Appos self penned journal, Mr. Gilfoyle paints a sharp portrait of the history of The Tombs, Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) and the beginnings of Rikers Island as a jail facility. Along the way the reader is introduced to a variety of criminals that make Damon Runyon's characters look like choir boys.

This book is strongly recommended for lovers of Old New York, as well as the characters that inhabited the city in it's nefarious heydays of the late 19th Century.