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| Author: Paul Clemens
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $7.73
You Save: $6.22 (45%)
New (24) Used (12) from $4.39
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 186539
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 1400075963
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781400075966
ASIN: 1400075963
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
 TOO MUCH SELF AGGRANDIZEMENT March 16, 2006
10 out of 20 found this review helpful
If the author had spent more time telling us about Detroit and less time telling us how literate he is then it would have been a lot better book.
Capitalizing on the 8 mile mythos February 19, 2006
17 out of 25 found this review helpful
Were it not for Eminem's diatribes of the hood and a handful of curious Detroiter's (former and current), I can't imagine what interest this book would hold for anyone. I know the area Clemens speaks of and it is nothing short of amazing that he has so little to write about that is interesting. I suspect that the author was an "academic-in-waiting" from his earliest years and that the sounds and heat of the street were a little too dangerous for his sensitive soul. I will give him credit for being a decent writer, though. Furthermore, claims by a number of reviewers that Mr. Clemens is racist are pure politically correct nonsense. It is more likely the case that the author is guilty of being white and a bit naive.
 The Decline of the Auto Industrial Beginnings. February 4, 2006
3 out of 16 found this review helpful
In the early 1930s, Detroit was the fourth-largest city in America due mainly to Southern migration to find jobs in the auto manufacturing plants. "Its population lured in part by Henry Ford's promise of a five-dollar workday, had doubled between 1910 and 1920 and increased another sixty percent in the next decade, by which time it exceeded a million and a half residents." At its peak, the Great Migration to Michigan's southeastern corner seemed poised to go higher. In 1950, the city's population peaked at just below two million residents; in the 60s, it continued to dip to 1.67 million and, in 1970, that number slipped to 1.5 million.
This memoir of Paul Clemens, whose family lived in the northeast corner of Detroit in a bungalow, covers the decline during the twenty-year-reign of Mayor Coleman Young. Elected the year Paul was born (1973), one year after Motown Records was moved from Detroit to Hollywood. "In 1980, after Young had served a term and a half in office, the population fell to 1.2 million and, in 1990, the total number of residents stood at just over a million. The population is now well under that figure, and will never again come within whispering distance of it."
The city had been settled in 1701 by Frenchmen who had come down from Montreal in the company of Algonquin Indians to set up a trading post. Detroit can now be reached from Windsor, Canada, through an underwater mile tunnel; it was the most Canadian of American cities with Young as Detroit's uncontested king. Like our former mayor who was in control and power for fourteen years, Young allowed the inner city to decline while he played politics. "The distinguishing feature of Young's tenure was that, as the years went on, he found himself in firmer control of less and less."
One redeeming feature of the town was the Belle Island where they held the bicycle races, the elegantly laid out interior designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of Central Park. At the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, the gas shortages, and the Olympics boycotts, it seemed to be "a national political trendsetter, an area in which large numbers of ethnic Catholics and unionized blue-collar workers decided to vote against Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election."
By the time Paul left his narrow world to go off to college, "Metropolitan Detroit was now four million people, with less than a quarter of that in the city itself. To most people, Detroit now meant everything but." He relates how life was as he lived it and charted the city's long decline during Young's twenty years at the helm. This year, the Motor City will recover somewhat for the one-day event when sports fans will converge for the 40th Super Bowl at the stadium there for the Pittsburgh Steelers/Seattle Seahawks game. Why Detroit?
 Only Buy This Racist Tract Used, or Don't Waste Your Time February 2, 2006
19 out of 46 found this review helpful
There are three significant problems with this book. "Made in Detroit," is poorly written. Clemens thinks, "went over like a led balloon," is a fine simile. It is not. But Clemens begs his readers to compare him to Baldwin, Hemmingway, and others, a desperate attempt for sophistication he is unlikely to ever gain. (2) Clemens' book is racist and anti-working class to the core. Clemens clearly adopted his fathers' hatred of unions, and formed his own uncritical take on racism, expecting readers to chuckle at his portrayal of African Americans as "moolies." (3) Clemens knows nearly nothing important about Detroit. He views the city through an inverted telescope, each lens juncture narrowing his already myopic view; racism, sexism, the meanest forms of conservative Catholicism, his unexamined views of exploitation and resistance, all merge to give him a key-hole view of, not the city, but himself, his trifling family relationships, and his trembling edicts about his wife-who, I know from experience, is all aflutter about his critics. There are good books about Detroit, like "Whose Detroit?" or "American Odyssey" by Conot (openly fictional, unlike Clemens' piece), or Ewens, "Corporate Power and Urban Crisis," or Mirel's "Rise and Fall of an Urban School System." Clemens work is, flatly, too small-minded to be taken seriously. Only the fact that racism sells could lead local reviewers, and the publisher, to push this book. For those who seek my longer review of Clemens book, google "Michigan Citizen , Made In Detroit." I am the San Diego State prof critiqued in a review below.
Raised in Detroit too January 14, 2006
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
I was born and raised in Detroit, but on the west and northwest side of Detroit. I found Clemens to sound a little racist, although it was very much the way it was. I also found his book to be jumping around too much. One paragraph he's an adult and the next paragraph he's back to being a young kid riding with his father. It was also a little depressing to me seeing in the print the way Detroit has become more of a depressed city and one that offers little for the suburbanites to come to the city. Mostly out of fear.
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