Devil's night

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Written by a native son of ``Murder Capital, U.S.A.,'' who, like the majority of white Detroiters, high-tailed it out of town after the 1967 race riot (in Chafets's case, to Israel), this tour of ``the first major Third World city'' in America is an enormously unsettling read and a tragically accurate picture of a dying metropolis. Through personal observation and interviews with local citizens and officials, Chafets ( Members of the Tribe ) captures the social and emotional hopelessness that has taken hold in the Motor City, best evidenced by ``Devil's Night''--an unofficial, regional holiday (on the night before Halloween) that has evolved from an evening of childish pranks (i.e. soaping windows) into a psychotic festival of burning down houses. Equally unnerving is the author's penchant for sweeping generalizations (``the redneck suburbs'') and his tendancy to shy away from tougher issues such as the root causes of the city's problems. Granted an extremely rare interview with Detroit's controversial mayor, Coleman Young, Chafets fails to ask hard-hitting questions, leaving this work fairly sensationalistic. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Chafets, the Israeli-based author of Members of the Tribe ( LJ 11/15/88) and Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men ( LJ 4/15/86), has drawn a bold sketch, already excerpted in the New York Times Magazine , of his hometown Detroit. Abandoned and hated by whites, with a people and mayor seething because they cannot turn political control into economic self-sufficiency, Detroit is America's first Third World city, Chafets asserts. Lacking the scholarly precision and analysis of Sidney Fine's Violence in the Motor City (Univ. of Michigan Pr., 1989) or the inside access of Wilbur Rich's biography of the mayor, Coleman Young and Detroit Politics (Wayne State Univ. Pr., 1989), Chafets's account instead relies on ``close approximations'' of the truth from his various interviews with Detroit inhabitants. Because of this, Chafets can only provide a partial, often faulty picture of the city, but one that is nevertheless compelling. Recommended for larger urban studies and city library collections.-- JoEllen Vinyard, Eastern Michigan Univ., Ypsilanti