Review by Choice Review
Well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Washington Post editor Maraniss explores 18 months in the mid-1960s when Detroit's great achievers and ordinary citizens were very optimistic. Their city was making unique contributions with cars, Motown music, unions, and civil rights. However, the author's self-described "urban biography" notes Detroit also faced growing white flight to suburbs, automobile factory closures and job loss, black-white racial tensions over housing and jobs, and an African American community's poor relations with an overwhelmingly white police force. Maraniss retells well-documented events but adds new insights about a number of them, as well as other lesser-known but important stories. He highlights activities of well-known Detroiters and recounts stories of hundreds of others, from Motown stars to community leaders, mobsters, auto execs and workers, et al. Skillfully weaving into his engaging chronological narrative personal recollections from both famous and regular citizens, Maraniss makes excellent use of his numerous interviews and thorough research in Michigan and national archives, oral history excerpts, and Detroit newspaper quotes. Detailed descriptions of local places will educate even Michiganders. Excellent index and selected bibliography, 34 photos of key personalities, several Detroit maps, and a very useful time line. A well-written, fascinating book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --John Lawrence Revitte, Michigan State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
DAVID MARANISS'S "Once in a Great City" concerns Detroit in 1963 - a crucial year, this book asserts, in the city's history, marking the end of its boom times and the beginning of its end times. Though my Detroit birth and upbringing were still a decade off, 1963 was a big year for me, too. My dad graduated from high school in the city that spring, and my mom would begin her senior year that fall. For their first date, they went to see "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." The ingredients for the city's apocalypse would seem to have come together along with those of my existence. The degree of difficulty here is high. Though temporally narrow - the fall of '62 through the spring of '64 - the book's subject matter couldn't be wider, encompassing anything Maraniss deems relevant to his purposes. And he needs to make a reader feel the immediate promise of 1963 even while sensing, in the distance, a drumbeat of doom. His choice of year helps: the uplift of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, followed by the crash of the John F. Kennedy assassination - the "seven seconds that broke the back of the American century," in Don DeLillo's famous formulation. Maraniss quotes a columnist for The Michigan Chronicle, Detroit's leading black newspaper, who summed up the year wonderfully: "There have been periods, some long and some short, representing all facets of things that happened in 1963, but no one year to our knowledge encompassed and mirrored - with such complete clarity and depth of meaning - the whole dramatic history of the United States." And no city encompasses that American drama quite like Detroit. This has been the central conceit of almost every big Detroit book for the last quarter-century, going back to Ze'ev Chafets's "Devil's Night" - that what happens in this city has an explanatory power that the goings-on in other cities simply lack. (This happens to be true, by the way, though I would say that.) So what broke Detroit's back, tipping its half-century rise into a half-century descent that culminated in the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history? It's a story that's been told before, typically as distinct narratives: Detroit and cars, Detroit and race, Detroit and labor, Detroit and music. The great virtue of Maraniss's bighearted book is that it casts a wide net, collecting and seeking to synthesize these seemingly disparate strands. You finish "Once in a Great City" feeling mildly shattered, which is exactly as it should be. The cast of characters is huge: Kennedy and King, Walter Reuther, the Ford family, Berry Gordy Jr. and his Motown artists, Malcolm X, the Franklins (the Rev. C.L. and Aretha), Lyndon Johnson, Lee Iacocca, various mobsters. Even where the material is familiar, the connections Maraniss makes among these figures feel fresh. He's even better on the lesser known. There's the progressive police commissioner, George Edwards, keen to improve community relations, who "had arrived in Detroit in 1936 with $50, his life's possessions in a single suitcase and his hopes resting in the dream that he could write a novel on the industrial urban condition, a Detroit auto plant variation of 'The Jungle.'" There's Esther Gordy, Berry Jr.'s oldest sister - "the keeper of the castle," as he called her - who, when her little brother was feeling inferior to their father, "was the one who gave him a copy of Rudyard Kipling's 'If and had him memorize the lines." I was familiar with neither figure before and came away feeling I could read a whole book about either, along with a muckraking novel by Edwards. Motown is clearly where Maraniss's heart is, and it is where his materials - music, race, civil rights - come together most naturally. The story of how Motown Records was staked deserves to be as famous as Ben Franklin's plan for self-improvement. Berry Gordy Jr. received $800 from "the family fund, a money pool into which all blood relatives and their spouses contributed $10 a month.... The parents and all eight brothers and sisters had a vote on when and how loans could be distributed." The interest rate on the loan, Maraniss tells us, was 6 percent. IN A BLURB, Gay Talese applauds the book's "prodigious research." You come away awed by Maraniss's legwork while wishing he had included somewhat less of it. There's a lot of who, what, when and where. (Maraniss is a newsman at The Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize winner.) He gives street addresses to family homes, the exact departure times of flights, the precise duration of a helicopter ride. This accretion of unilluminating details adds a degree of verisimilitude, certainly, but it leaves out analysis - the why. In an early Motown section, there's a sentence that approaches 100 words and details the itinerary of the Motortown Revue, the 1962 roadshow that would expose Motown artists to America. Reading it, you're reminded of the advice Maraniss quotes Gordy giving to an aspiring songwriter just pages earlier: "You need the hook and the song structure, with a beginning, a middle and an end. You gotta do it like a story." The book has a great hook, but you can go a little while without hearing it. Another problem, stemming from the fact that the pages are full of so many public figures, is that it is overfull of their public pronouncements. Not everyone is at the level of a Kennedy or a King. The book contains too much speechifying boilerplate. These are small criticisms, embedded in which is a much larger compliment: The book could have used more Maraniss. Because it has no central character, and no clear through-line other than the calendar, you want less ephemera and more of his controlling intelligence. And even these minor flaws are forgivable, since his researcher's drive to uncover and his writer's tendency to include yield so many illuminating details, among them several that simply light up the sky. "Along the route," Maraniss writes of the Walk to Freedom, the civil rights march that ended at Cobo Hall, with King delivering an early version of the Dream speech, "three observers were injured in falls, seven marchers fainted from heat and exhaustion, 26 children were separated from their parents, and four people were arrested, including two drunks and a pickpocket." Such details - selected by the author, properly contextualized and clearly put - are like gifts from the nonfiction gods. They work in and of themselves, and they illuminate the larger point: that despite the fears (or hopes) of naysayers, the march went off without a hitch. At such moments, you can practically hear a click as the machinery of Maraniss's book comes together. The book ends where it must, just down the road from Detroit in Ann Arbor, with Lyndon Johnson's announcement of the Great Society. (We know that what's to come in Detroit isn't so great, and the book's characters do not. Thus, the mildly shattered feeling.) Let's not dwell, however, on the depths that the city would hit - and from which, slowly, it is beginning to rise. Instead, let's stay at Detroit's high point in 1963 - the high point of Maraniss's book as well - which was the Walk to Freedom. Several pages after telling us of the march's two drunks and its lone pickpocket, in a superb parenthetical aside, Maraniss notes the following: "Inserted into the official programs for the Walk to Freedom were brochures outlining travel arrangements for Detroiters to attend the March on Washington ... at a cost of $28.25 per person." That 28.25 is like 27 outs in baseball: It's the perfect number. It couldn't be anything else. It tingles the spine. American history, you can't help thinking, must be littered with such bargains. Maybe, you can't help hoping, it might be again. PAUL CLEMENS'S most recent book is "Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant." He is completing a novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 14, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Long before Detroit became the poster city for the Rust Belt and urban decay, its leading indicators were already faltering. Maraniss, a native son and a continuing admirer despite the city's travails, chronicles 18 months, from the fall of 1962 to the spring of 1964, to offer a compelling portrait of one of America's most iconic cities. The car guys dominated the economy and the culture of the city, calling the shots on every major decision, deciding the fates of workers and politicos. At the same time, the emerging music scene of Motown gave promise to the aspirations of black Detroiters. It was a time when Detroit was so confident that it was making a bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics. But a report by Wayne State University already foresaw many of the demographic and economic changes that would eventually lead to the decline of Detroit. Maraniss highlights the class and race frictions that demarcated and defined the city and gives readers a glimpse of the colorful life of mobsters and moguls, entertainers and entrepreneurs. Among the famous Detroiters he highlights are Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca, Berry Gordy Jr., George Romney, and the Reverend C. L. Franklin. Maraniss captures Detroit just as it is both thriving and dying, at the peak of its vibrancy and on the verge of its downfall.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Using a combination of historical eyewitness reports and sketches of larger-than-life figures, Pulitzer-winning reporter Maraniss (Barack Obama: The Story) draws a sprawling portrait of Detroit at a pivotal moment when it was "dying and thriving at the same time." Given its current turmoil, it is easy to forget the Detroit that once was. Between the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964, Detroit was at its peak. It was a front-runner in the bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics; its local civil rights leaders organized the Walk to Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. workshopped his famous "I Have a Dream" speech; Ford Motor Co. released the Mustang; Berry Gordy was honing the soon-to-be famous "Motown sound" on West Grand Boulevard; and Walter Reuther, head of UAW, was guiding labor towards progressive reform. But even in this golden age, all was not well in Detroit. Discriminatory housing practices, intended to prevent minorities from entering the toniest neighborhoods, were exacerbating existing racial tensions, and the city's organized crime could not be cleaned up despite the police commissioner's best efforts. But for all his exhaustive research and evocative scene-setting, Maraniss never seems to find the zeitgeist of the historical moment he covers, the essential spirit that lifted up but ultimately ruined the Motor City. Maps & photos. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
During the period 1962-64, Detroit appeared to be on top of the world. Auto production among the Big Three-General Motors (GM), Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler-was strong. Ford planned to roll out the revolutionary Mustang pony car. Berry Gordy and Motown established a fresh sound in the record industry. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Police Commissioner George Edwards attempted to make strides on race relations. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an early version of his "I Have a Dream" speech in the city two months prior to the March on Washington. Civic leaders planned to make a bid for Detroit to host the 1968 summer Olympic Games. However, -Maraniss (Rome 1960) points out that serious problems existed. De facto segregation and tense race relations continued. Differences over tactics divided members of the local civil rights movement. Urban renewal decimated long-standing ethnic neighborhoods. Strains in relations between labor and management led to strikes in the auto industry in 1964. And Wayne State University issued a report predicting the rapid drop in the city's population and the movement of white residents from Detroit to its suburbs. The seeds for the decline of a great city were planted. As reader, -Maraniss does an excellent job presenting this saga. VERDICT Recommended for all collections. ["A colorful, detailed history of the rise and ultimate decline of Detroit that will appeal to sociologists, historians, music lovers, and car fans alike": LJ 7/15 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Hot times in a raucous city. Biographer and Washington Post associate editor Maraniss (Barack Obama: The Story, 2013, etc.) spent only his first six and a half years in Detroit, so he was surprised when he "choked up" after seeing a car commercial extolling the Motor City. That affection inspired this fast-paced, sprawling, copiously detailed look at 18 monthsfrom 1962 to 1964in the city's past. During that time, big things happened in Detroit. Motown burst onto the music scene after the Motortown Revue left the city on a nationwide tour. Ford developed a new car, kept secret except from the prestigious J. Walter Thompson advertising agency; unveiled at the New York World's Fair in 1964, the Mustang became an instant, bestselling hit. Detroit fought fiercely for the 1968 Olympics, but despite support from native son Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, and Governor George Romney, Detroit lost to Mexico City. Detroit was embroiled in the civil rights movement, as well, with Cavanagh and union head Walter Reuther among many leaders taking a strong stand for racial equality. Reuther even rounded up money to bail out demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and he never wavered in his commitment to freedom and justice. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an early version of his "I have a dream" speech at the city's much-publicized Walk to Freedom, in which Reuther, Cavanagh, and 100,000 others marched; it was, said one participant, "a model of peaceful protest and racial cooperation" during a time of national unrest. Although overstuffed with facts (for example, that Cavanagh "kept four extra suits, thirteen striped ties," and abundant shirts in his office for a quick change), and sometimes breaching the city's boundaries to become a history of the whole country, Maraniss' brawny narrative evokes a city still "vibrantly alive" and striving for a renaissance. An illuminating history of a golden era in a city desperately seeking to reclaim the glory. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
