Detroit City - Is the Place to Be

Detroit City - Is the Place to Be Mark Binellie I wanted to like this book, I really did. I mean, I kept starting it, getting distracted and putting it down, only to have to restart it again later. I think I did this for at least a year, if not longer. Finally, I committed to finishing it, just because I was tired of seeing it on my night stand, or bookshelf, or wherever I had left it, mocking me with its promise of “The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.”

The problem I had with the book, was that I think the author was trying to hard not to be that voyeuristic outsider journalist that he comes down hard on. And while he is not an outsider (he grew up in Detroit and returned there not long before starting to write this book) his attempts to tie things together to a greater theme than “look at how awful Detroit is!” And while that attempt to dig beneath is admirable, it ultimately didn’t work for me because I don’t think he ever really solidly landed on an overlying theme, and perhaps that is as much the fault of the city, as it is Binelli’s. For example, towards the end he starts out about the history of meditation and Renaissance Italy and ties that to his family roots, and then ties one of Detroit’s ruins (Michigan Central) to Italian art.

Added to that, the people that Binelli interviews and speaks with never really came to life for me – I think that might be due to the fact that he mostly tells us what they said to us (we don’t hear their own voices) as opposed to occasionally getting a direct quote. Also, there are a lot of people that make appearances in the book without being connected to something else, or being followed up on. This too, made the other people more one-dimensional than I think Binelli intended. I think Binelli was trying to distinguish himself from those other writers that he viewed as rubber-necker journalists, but in the end, I think his attempts to completely avoid any appearance of such, hurt the book. It’s not a bad book by any means and I feel like I learned a bit more about the politics of the city, but ultimately, it’s not a book I’m likely to read again.