Once In A Great City

A Detroit Story

By: David Maraniss

Narrated by: David Maraniss

“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 Detroit auto industry was selling more cars than ever before. Yet the shadows of collapse were evident even then as urban decline and racial tension simmered beneath the surface.

“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 the American Dream of prosperity that was already past history. “An encyclopedic account of Detroit in the early sixties, a kind of hymn to what really was a great city” (The New Yorker).

A heartfelt history of the Motor City

A dense history of a slice of Detroit's history, Once in a Great City covers late 1962 through mid 1964. The good, the bad and the ugly gets thorough coverage - sometimes too thorough as names and places rapidly pass by. Many sections leave you wondering what is pertinent and what is local color.

Maraniss obviously loves his topic, but his reading leaves something to be desired. Expressing very little emotion, I often found my attention wandering because of Maraniss's monotone.

But I'm a Michigan native so the book was extremely relevant to me. I loved getting a detailed picture of that time in Detroit's history.

Great read

For those interested in Detroit or urban history, this is well-written book, focusing on themes of the struggles of the African-American community for equal rights, the rise of Motown, the UAW and the automobile companies, the Detroit mafia, and the failed bid to land the 1968 Olympics. But I am a Detroiter, so hearing the names of familiar people and places was part of my enjoyment of the book.

Takes me back...

I am the same age as the author but grew up several miles north of him in Detroit. I remembered some of the things he described in those pivotal years, and knew many of the stories; as an adult I got to know the union and political figures he talks about and know the places he describes. I very much enjoyed the book and learned a lot about the city I call home and it's place in, and influence on, the larger world. Detroit is resilient and working to be great again

Great introduction to complicated city

Easy to have going on in the background and thoroughly enjoyed the high level look into Motown history and its personalities. It targets a very specific time in Detroit's history, so if you're looking for a deeper understanding or background of the politics or the car companies you'll need to find other books. That said, this is a good place to start your exploration of Motor City.

Wonderful topic, problematic narration

What did you love best about Once in a Great City?

All of the sub-stories that Maraniss chooses to portray one year in the life of a fascinating city.

What aspect of David Maraniss’s performance would you have changed?

Perhaps it's a little TOO slow, given the pace of historical and cultural change that he's chronicling.
More important, though, is his failure to use the past perfect tense in his writing. I've seen this trend taking over more and more current writing, and it can cause unnecessary confusion. When a story is already set in the past, using the simple past tense for actions that are jumping between two historical eras is lazy--and downright strange sometimes. (Example, not from this book: "When she entered college at age 18, she lived with her grandmother, who was a homecoming queen and campus beauty.") Huh?