by Nathan Bomey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2016
An engaging reconstruction of Detroit’s financial crisis and the broader implications of its comeback for other American...
A chronicle of the infamous bankruptcy of the Motor City, from financial mismanagement to rebirth.
In retrospect, the headline-stealing bankruptcy of Detroit, the largest municipality to file in American history, seems both tragically inevitable and necessary. For decades, the automotive industry that defined the city had been shrinking and consolidating, putting pressure on the city’s finances to deal with growing expenses and a shortage of tax income. But that’s only a single example identified by USA Today journalist Bomey in a lengthy list of reasons that gets at the complexity and systemic nature of Detroit’s problems, including an overextension and overcommitment to debt service, pension payments, and retiree health care costs. The author, who was the lead reporter for the Detroit Free Press on the city’s bankruptcy, hints at the chain of events that led to Detroit’s ruin, but his focus is on the elected officials, bureaucrats, and financiers tasked with trying to rescue the city. Among them are the appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr and former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose embarrassing corruption scandal led to his conviction on racketeering charges following the end of his term in 2008, an event that can be read as the symbolic death knell of the city. As Bomey breaks down the numbers behind the city’s default, he provides eye-popping statistics that perfectly capture the near-apocalyptic level of duress. For instance, adjusted for inflation, the total value of private property in Detroit fell from $45.2 billion in 1958 to $9.6 billion in 2012. Though the book is well-paced and highly readable, the collapse of Detroit is not an undocumented subject, and there is little in this narrative that has not already been dissected at length. But it’s an important subject, since the tale of Detroit’s financial woes can serve as a case study on how other cities can deal with economic transition.
An engaging reconstruction of Detroit’s financial crisis and the broader implications of its comeback for other American cities.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24891-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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