Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story, Maraniss - B +

                                               To most people Detroit, signifies all that is wrong with urban America.  As I made  hundreds of business trips there between 1985 and 2004, I have a somewhat different perspective.  Thirty years ago it was going downhill, but you could tell it had once been great. You could see that its downtown had the same glorious limestone skyscrapers that New York and Chicago do.  GM's old headquarters on West Grand Blvd. was majestic. The automotive industry had been the heart of America's industrial greatness.

                                              This book looks at the Detroit story through the prism of the year-and-a-half from November 1962 to the summer of 1964 and is meant to tell just how great it was at its apogee. The author is a native and this is a tribute to the city's past. Detroit was riding high that fall. It was the fifth largest city in America. G.M.'s market share was close to 60% of the booming US market and the Big Three had virtually no competition in the states. The middle class prospered because the auto workers were the highest paid blue-collar workers in the country.  His record company was doing so well that Berry Gordy, Jr. decided to take the Motown Revue on the road for 56 days. The city's grandees were preparing a bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics. In Dearborn, the design staff at Ford had come up with a car that would become the iconic symbol of Ford Motor Company, and perhaps, the entire decade. Lee Iacocca was working with the J. Walter Thompson advertising team to find a name for what they would ultimately call the Mustang. In June, the Reverend C. L. Franklin (father of Aretha), Walter Reuther of the UAW and Martin Luther King stepped off on Woodward Ave. for the Walk To Freedom.  A hundred thousand people, the then largest civil rights demonstration in US history, trekked the three miles to Cobo Arena, where many heard Dr. King rehearse the refrain he would make famous two months later.  Throughout 1963 and into 1964, Motown Records created a whirlwind of excellence, unparalleled then and to this day. Gordy brought to the world, and the world received with open arms, the Miracles, the Temptations, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells and Smokey Robinson. Detroit in 1963 had had its biggest year ever, selling more cars than ever before. GM's profits were $3.3 billion. The city dominated American industry and music. In the spring President Johnson unveiled the Great Society in a speech at the University of Michigan. It all of course, unravelled quickly and soon thereafter, a victim of racial conflict and the international onslaught in the auto industry. Maraniss points no fingers and pays homage to what had been.