Motor City Green

Motor City Green
Author: Joseph S. Cialdella
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822987023

Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues that Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city’s social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today’s urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city’s past.

Motor City Blue

Motor City Blue
Author: Loren D. Estleman
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2011-06-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453220488

The first book in the long-running Amos Walker Mysteries introduces the hard-boiled Detroit detective as he searches for an aging mobster’s missing adopted daughter Private eye Amos Walker is a Vietnam veteran who was thrown out of the Police Academy for punching a fellow cadet. He’s a hard man in a ruined city, scratching out a living looking for lost things. Walker’s latest case comes by way of ex-mobster Ben Morningstar, who’s been living out his retirement in Phoenix while raising Maria, the daughter of a long-ago murdered friend. Only now, Maria is missing and the gangster needs Walker’s help. But the trail has gone cold—the only clue is a faded pornographic snapshot. Never one to give up, Walker witnesses the kidnapping of a former Vietnam friend and solves the murder of a young black labor leader while slugging his way to a solution. Fans of Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction will find Estleman’s lean prose, retro style, and tough-guy hero irresistible. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Motor City

Motor City
Author: Bill Morris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1992
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780671868130

Fictional account of the automobile industry and Detroit in the early 1950s.

Motor City Mafia

Motor City Mafia
Author: Scott M. Burnstein
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2006-10-16
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 143963310X

Learn the story behind one of Detroit's most infamous mobs with rare photographs documenting their rise and fall. Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit chronicles the storied and hallowed gangland history of the notorious Detroit underworld. Scott M. Burnstein takes the reader inside the belly of the beast, tracking the bloodshed, exploits, and leadership of the southeast Michigan crime syndicate as never before seen in print. Through a stunning array of rare archival photographs and images, Motor City Mafia captures Detroit's most infamous past, from its inception in the early part of the 20th century, through the years when the iconic Purple Gang ruled the city's streets during Prohibition, through the 1930s and the formation of the local Italian mafia, and the Detroit crime family's glory days in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, all the way to the downfall of the area's mob reign in the 1980s and 1990s.

Motor City Music

Motor City Music
Author: Mark Slobin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190882107

This is the first-ever historical study across all musical genres in any American metropolis. Detroit in the 1940s-60s was not just "the capital of the twentieth century" for industry and the war effort, but also for the quantity and extremely high quality of its musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. The author, a Detroiter from 1943, begins with a reflection of his early life with his family and others, then weaves through the music traffic of all the sectors of a dynamic and volatile city. Looking first at the crucial role of the public schools in fostering talent, Motor City Music surveys the neighborhoods of older European immigrants and of the later huge waves of black and white southerners who migrated to Detroit to serve the auto and defense industries. Jazz stars, polka band leaders, Jewish violinists, and figures like Lily Tomlin emerge in the spotlight. Shaping institutions, from the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers through radio stations and Motown, all deployed music to bring together a city rent by relentless segregation, policing, and spasms of violence. The voices of Detroit's poets, writers, and artists round out the chorus.

Motor City Muscle

Motor City Muscle
Author: Mike Mueller
Publisher: Motorbooks
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-02-11
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 1610597923

This is the high-performance tale of what was undoubtedly the fastest, loosest era in automotive history. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, America’s carmakers fought an unbridled war for street supremacy. The warriors ranged from light and agile Z/28 Camaros and Boss 302 Mustangs to big-block brutes like the 440 Road Runner and Stage I 455 Buick GS. A few of these boulevard brawlers were closing on 500 horsepower before the insurance lobby, Ralph Nader, OPEC, and various governmental agencies conspired to stop the madness. Muscle cars all but disappeared by 1974, with only a few anemic models soldiering through the 1980s. But by the 1990s, thanks to vastly improved engine technology, muscle cars were back with a vengeance. Motor City Muscle traces the full history right up to today’s new Mustang, Camaro, and Challenger.

Motor City Champs

Motor City Champs
Author: Scott Ferkovich
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-02-12
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1476666598

In the early 1930s, the Motor City was sputtering from the Great Depression. Then came a talented Detroit Tigers team, steered by player-manager Mickey Cochrane, to inject new pride into the Detroit psyche. It was a cast of colorful characters, with such nicknames as Schoolboy, Goose, Hammerin' Hank and Little Tommy. Over two seasons in 1934 and 1935, the team powered its way to the top of the baseball world, becoming a symbol of a resurgent metropolis and winning the first-ever Tigers championship. This exhaustively researched account provides an in-depth look into a remarkable period in baseball history.

Breaking the Banks in Motor City

Breaking the Banks in Motor City
Author: Darwyn H. Lumley
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2009-09-12
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 0786454148

This history tells the relatively unknown story of how the Detroit automobile industry played a major role in the 1933 banking crisis and the subsequent New Deal reforms that drastically changed the financial industry. Spurred by failed decision making and conflicts of interest by automobile industry leaders, Detroit banks experienced a critical emergency, precipitating the federal closure of banks on March 4, 1933, the first in a series of actions by which the federal government acquired power over economics previously held by states and private industrial and financial interests.

Motor City Dream Garages

Motor City Dream Garages
Author: Don Sherman, Rex Roy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release:
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 9781610590907

There isn't another place in the world that can match Detroit's automotive history. For nearly a century, what was conceived, designed, produced, and marketed from this town ruled the roads. So it only stands to reason that the Motor City is likely to host some of the country's greatest collector garages. From the personal home of the man who put America on wheels to the posh residences of current automotive icons such as Bob Lutz, Motor City Dream Garages takes readers on a guided tour of 20-plus of Motown's most interesting garages. Going beyond even these fantastic garagemahals, this book also takes readers inside select company garages for exclusive looks at the unique and important collections amassed by companies such as General Motors and Roush Industries (parent company to Roush Racing, owned by Jack Roush). If you like both garages and the beautiful machines within, this book is for you!