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    Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story
    Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story
    Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story
    Audiobook13 hours

    Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story

    Written by David Maraniss

    Narrated by David Maraniss

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    “A fascinating political, racial, economic, and cultural tapestry” (Detroit Free Press), Once in a Great City is a tour de force from David Maraniss about the quintessential American city at the top of its game: Detroit in 1963.

    Detroit in 1963 is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; Motown’s founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, the incredible Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon and Civil Rights advocate; car salesman Lee Iacocca; Police Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. The time was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before. Yet the shadows of collapse were evident even then.

    “Elegiac and richly detailed” (The New York Times), in Once in a Great City David Maraniss shows that before the devastating riot, before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight; before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt infirmities and competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world economy and by the transfer of American prosperity to the information and service industries. In 1963, as Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit summed up America’s path to prosperity and jazz that was already past history. “Maraniss has written a book about the fall of Detroit, and done it, ingeniously, by writing about Detroit at its height….An encyclopedic account of Detroit in the early sixties, a kind of hymn to what really was a great city” (The New Yorker).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9781442387928
    Author

    David Maraniss

    David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

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    Reviews for Once In A Great City

    4/5

    38 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Was very interesting, Brought back a lot of good memories!
    • 3/5
      Read by the author who does a great job.Excellent for what it is, which is a nostalgia for a time and place - Detroit in the early 1960's. Maraniss pulls lots of interesting stories together to paint a picture of a vibrant city on the rise, but with hints of the decline to come. Interestingly, the timing (based on what I heard Maraniss say in his recent interview with Chris Hayes on the "Why is this Happening" podcast) appears to be about when Maraniss and his family moved from Detroit to Washington DC. His interest in, even love for this time and place, for whatever personal reasons, clearly comes through.Disappointing for what it's not, which is an analysis of why things went from there to here. While "hints" are there of the decline in the offing, Maraniss doesn't spend much time in analysis, he'd rather evoke for us the time and place that was.If you, like the author, have an interest in Detroit in the early 60's you'll like this book. As a native of Michigan born in 1960 who rarely saw Detroit in person, and then mostly from the neighborhood around Tiger Stadium, I learned much I had not known before, and I found the book really interesting. I just hoped it would be more.
    • 4/5
      Once in a Great City A Setroit Story, by David Maraniss (read 14 Aug 2016) This is the 4th book I have read authored by David Maraniss. He is a acile and readable writer, and the theme of this book is not an obvious one. It covers a little less than two years in Detroit's history--from 1962 to 1964. Maraniss was born in Detroit though he lft there when he was six. But he tells an evocative and attention-holding story of momentous times in Detroit's history--of a time when Detroit still had a population of over a million people (its population now is under 700,000. If I had more interest in music I would have appreciated the book more but its account of George Romney, Walter Reuther, LBJ, and other political figures of the day is of great interest. A very good book.
    • 3/5
      An examination of Detroit during a narrow period of time with an expected liberal bias about race, government and business. Interesting narrative about Detroit' attempt at obtaining the 1968 Olympic games and the cities contribution to the music world. Epilogue showed author's blind spot toward the corruption/ incompetence of the Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick administrations that contributed as greatly to Detroit's physical and spiritual deterioration as did the globalization of the auto industry and the flight to the suburbs.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful book. The author is a native of the city, and he talks about all of the things that matter: motown,the car industry, and politics. He does not blame anyone for the decline, but simply attributes it to companies moving out andthe job loss.
    • 3/5
      ONCE IN A GREAT CITY is a history book, and it reads like a history book. In other words, it contains lots and lots of information, but it's not a page turner. I want to read page turners, so perhaps this review is not fair to David Maraniss, considering all the extensive research he did for this.But I saw this book on at least one best-of-the-month list and read that it told how, even with all the greatness of people and events in Detroit during the early 1960s, there were signs that the city was going to fall apart. This is not how I understand the book. Granted, there are examples throughout of the city's greatness in the early 1960s, mainly the rise of Motown music, cars (particularly the Mustang), civil rights, and unionization. But so much of that ends up being political. And the political discussions are, as political discussions always are, the way some people, not all of them, saw what took place. A reader should be suspicious of an author's objectivity when he writes about politics or, at least, the objectivity of his sources.The only discussion I see of signs of the city's downfall is a Wayne State University prediction. Yes, when Detroiters, both black and white, had the means to do so, they moved to the suburbs. But why? Something Maraniss presents as great wasn't. That's what should be discussed. What was wrong and could have been prevented?