Heather Ann Thompson,Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. viii + 295 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Extract

Recently, several books and movies have brought Motown out of the shadows as Detroit and its history are scrutinized from a variety of angles. Prominent among the scholarly works is Thomas Sugrue's award-winning The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which explores the question, how did a city—that was in the 1940s a shining boomtown—turn into a symbol of the tarnished American Dream within a few decades? While Sugrue's book is a major contribution for sorting out the forces that contributed to the transformation of postwar Detroit and moved the discussion of urban decay beyond ahistoric bromides attributing urban crisis to a culture of poverty, his scholarly treatment does not pretend to exhaustively cover all the social, political, and economic bases that influenced change in Detroit since 1945.