Part Two – Detroit: An American Autopsy

This is part two of our excerpt from Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy (out in hardcover now). You can read part one here. Journalists parachuted into town. The subjects in my Detroit News stories started appearing in Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, on NPR and PBS and CNN, but under someone else’s byline. The reporters rarely, if ever, offered nuanced appraisals of the city and its place in the American landscape. They simply took a tour of the ruins, ripped off the local headlines, pronounced it awful here and left. And it is awful here, there is…