1. Posted on 11 February, 2013

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    Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, tells Dave Davies about returning to his hometown of Detroit and finding it a very different city from the one he had left 20 years earlier: It was empty. It wasn’t scary. It was sort of like, in many respects, living at Chernobyl in some neighborhoods. … I looked and I thought to myself one day, ‘What happened here? What happened?’ And so this is not a book about ruin porn or empty buildings. This book is dedicated to those of us who live here in the industrial Midwest, specifically Detroit and its inner-ring suburbs. We’re still trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had. Image of Detroit circa 1917, “Looking Up Woodward Avenue” via Shorpy View in High-Res

    Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, tells Dave Davies about returning to his hometown of Detroit and finding it a very different city from the one he had left 20 years earlier:

    It was empty. It wasn’t scary. It was sort of like, in many respects, living at Chernobyl in some neighborhoods. … I looked and I thought to myself one day, ‘What happened here? What happened?’ And so this is not a book about ruin porn or empty buildings. This book is dedicated to those of us who live here in the industrial Midwest, specifically Detroit and its inner-ring suburbs. We’re still trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had.

    Image of Detroit circa 1917, “Looking Up Woodward Avenue” via Shorpy

  2. Fresh Air

    Interviews

    Charlie LeDuff

    Detroit: An Autopsy