Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

by David Maraniss
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

by David Maraniss

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Overview

“A fascinating political, racial, economic, and cultural tapestry” (Detroit Free Press), Once in a Great City is a tour de force from David Maraniss about the quintessential American city at the top of its game: Detroit in 1963.

Detroit in 1963 is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; Motown’s founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, the incredible Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon and Civil Rights advocate; car salesman Lee Iacocca; Police Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. The time was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before. Yet the shadows of collapse were evident even then.

“Elegiac and richly detailed” (The New York Times), in Once in a Great City David Maraniss shows that before the devastating riot, before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight; before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt infirmities and competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world economy and by the transfer of American prosperity to the information and service industries. In 1963, as Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit summed up America’s path to prosperity and jazz that was already past history. “Maraniss has written a book about the fall of Detroit, and done it, ingeniously, by writing about Detroit at its height….An encyclopedic account of Detroit in the early sixties, a kind of hymn to what really was a great city” (The New Yorker).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781476748405
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 09/15/2015
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 482,848
File size: 37 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

About The Author
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

Hometown:

Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin

Date of Birth:

August 6, 1949

Place of Birth:

Detroit, Michigan

Education:

University of Wisconsin

Read an Excerpt

Once in a Great City

Table of Contents

Author's Note 13

1 Gone 19

2 Ask Not 45

3 The Show 56

4 West Grand Boulevard 81

5 Party Bus 133

6 Glow 151

7 Motor City Mad Men 189

8 The Pitch of His Hum 211

9 An Important Man 234

10 Home Juice 263

11 Eight Lanes Down Woodward 275

12 Detroit Dreamed First 300

13 Heat Wave 320

14 The Vast Magnitude 344

15 Houses Divided 373

16 The Spirit of Detroit 412

17 Smoke Rings 455

18 Fallen 471

19 Big Old Waterboats 503

20 Unfinished Business 513

21 The Magic Skyway 561

22 Upward to the Great Society 592

Epilogue: Now and Then 611

Time Line 627

Notes 637

Selected Bibliography 679

Acknowledgments 685

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