Motor City Woe

Friday, 26th June 2009

Michigan native Amy Sullivan on the latest scandal in the Motor City:

Monica Conyers, Detroit councilwoman and wife* of House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, pled guilty today in a bribery case and now faces five years in prison. Conyers is only in her first term on the council, but had already previously made headlines for threatening to shoot a mayoral staffer, [and] accusing then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of rigging her office chair to electrocute her...

Kilpatrick, of course, is in jail himself these days. A book I'd like to read: a social, industrial, political and cultural history of Detroit, 1920-2009. It's a fascinating, if not melancholy and tragic tale that deserves a proper treatment. Maybe it's been written: can readers recommend any particular history of Detroit? Among American cities perhaps only Los Angeles has as interesting - and as tellingly symbolic - a story over the course of the last 80 years or so...

*She's 44; he's 80. For what it's worth.

Filed under: Americana (477 more articles)

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Olaf Rye

June 26th, 2009 9:15pm Report this comment

I have fond memories of the time I lived in Michigan and still enjoy visiting old colleagues there, made much more pleasant by the flight from Edinburgh to NYC (obviating the horror of Heathrow).

A good book on Michigan's history, which includes long sections on Detroit, is 'Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State' by Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May (Third Edition). This should be available online from Amazon or ABE Books.

RW Rogers

June 26th, 2009 9:50pm Report this comment

Can't help you with Detroit, but Dennis McDougal's Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty does a decent job of explaining Los Angeles in the process of telling the story of the Chandlers.

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