Book Review
Detroit. An American Autopsy 
3/5 stars  
"Fallacy of composition. Conflation of Detroit and the US"
July 25, 2015          
 *******
Another author (Paul Kersey) comes to the conclusion that the best way to destroy a city is to put black people in charge; He is explicit about why this is so. 

LeDuff spends a lot of time making excuses, and trying to change the subject.
 
What the readers takes away from it is exactly the same. (LeDuff mentions that the city existed since 1701 and was, for a time, the richest city in America-- Until Coleman Young.)

***What does LeDuff say in this book (about which he should know better)?

1. He keeps obsessively talking about the auto industry (or lack of it) as the cause of Detroit's problems. There are exactly two plants within the city of Detroit (Jefferson North and Detroit Hamtramck Assembly). A quick internet search shows that the plants, respectively, employ 4600 and 1600 people. You could double the number of auto working jobs and it would still account for less than 5% of the population of the whole city.

2. There is a lot of populist economics in here: i. Detroit doesn't have an industry because of foreign trade; ii. Foreign trade is bad; iii. It's the government's fault for "allowing" companies to leave the country (p. 80)

3. LeDuff ignores the fact that there are a number of cities that border/ are within a few miles of Detroit (Oak Park, Troy, Southfield and Berkley), and all of those cities seem to find something to keep their population employed.

4. Just because some black people take over a city and (predictably) ruin it does not mean that that is what the whole country looks like. Sorry, Charlie.

***What does he offer as an explanation (other than the obvious ones explored in the books of Paul Kersey and Ilana Mercer)? Nothing but excuses.

1. It's the fault of white racism (via mortgage covenants);
2. It's because of white flight;
3. It's because of industrial policy;
4. It's because of Clinton's trade agreement that "allowed companies to leave the country" (I am not sure why Hong Kong and Singapore are centers of prosperity);
5. It's because of the UAW;
6. It's because of greedy Wall Street Robber barons.

Again: Someone else is always responsible for the fate of Detroit except Detroit. (It does come out toward the end of the book that Charlie LeDuff's ancestors were blacks who changed to white. So much for that myth.)

***Who are the cast of characters in LeDuff's book?

1. Black robbers;
2. Black murderers;
3. Inept black governments (Kwame Kilpatrick, Monica Conyers and Cynthia Hathaway)
4. Black victims;
5. Black Muslim terrorists/ gangs (Imam Luqman Abdulllahp. 240);
6. Black escapists;
7. The author's dynasty-of-white-trash family

And the thing is: You could just change the names and you would be telling the same story in Flint, Saginaw, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Inkster (all in Michigan) or Nigeria/ Haiti/ Zimbabwe.

There are a series of books by Paul Kersey

(1.Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis

2. Detroit: The Unauthorized Autopsy of America's Bankrupt Black Metropolis

3. Black Mecca Down: The Collapse of the City too Busy to Hate

4. Guns, Blacks, and Steel: American Cities After the Civil Rights Era) 

.....that have caused a lot of controversy, and this one book (that says the same thing) has sold more copies than all of those books combined because of the way that the author says what he has to say.

There is another book, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, by an Ilana Mercer that shows (in dreadful detail) another firsthand example of what happens when black people try to run a government.

***What of the structure of the book?

1. The author's writing *is* good and pithy.
2. It is a series of vignettes that can be read one at a time. Each one takes less than 15 minutes to read;
3. The whole book takes about 3-3.5 hours to read.

Verdict: Recommended, but only at the price of $1.