Book Review: Detroit: a biography by Scott Martelle

 

Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle. Published April, 2012, Chicago Review Press, Incorporated. ISBN-13: 9781569765265, ISBN: 156976526X

 

Scott Martelle's in-depth look at Detroit is an enlightening read. He talks about the history of the city, from the earliest days until the very recent past, and the story he relates is at times painful to read. This is not, however, because of the writing; it is because the story of Detroit could have been so different! He relates what he feels are the main issues that caused the city to come to the place in which we find it, mainly the well-known fact that Detroit has basically only had one main industry for about a hundred years, and there was no cultivation of any other means of support for the city. However, the other little-mentioned fact that also hurt Detroit was that, after World War II, the "arsenal of democracy" stayed focused on automobiles, rather than trying to get a piece of the defense market on a larger scale. No one ever took another step toward diversification, while the auto companies themselves moved away and out of Detroit, leaving many without jobs and the city without revenue.

 

Martelle dwells quite a bit on the racial issues that have plagued the region, really, not just Detroit. These ways that people have been wrongly treated also help explain the downfall of a great city.  He lays out the entire saga, starting with the people who moved to Detroit from the southern states, because even the racism they encountered in Detroit was not as bad as staying in the South. However, it was bad enough. He describes the riots and their influence on the outcome of events in Detroit.

In the book Detroit: a biography, Martelle helps us understand the sheer size of the problem that is Detroit's reality with the use statistics from census data, historical records, and real estate. It is staggering to know, for instance, that housing values are a small fraction of what they were worth only ten years ago. This loss of valuation also impacts the property taxes that the city can receive and other revenue streams that have dried up just because of the huge amount of people who no longer live within the city limits. The problem is not all gloom and doom, but Martelle is more interested in giving a historical perspective to the issues surrounding the city of Detroit. This book was less entertaining than, say, Detroit City is the Place to Be, but my reading of it helped me understand just what is going on in the city of Detroit, and how it came to be this way.