Teardown (eBook)

Memoir of a Vanishing City

Gordon Young (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
320 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-97640-5 (ISBN)

Infos

After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish mansion, speculators scooped up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson was often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification.

Skillfully blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, Young constructs a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting—despite overwhelming odds—to rise from the ashes. He befriends a ragtag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard locals who refuse to give up as they try to transform Flint into a smaller, greener town that offers lessons for cities all over the world. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics.

Inhalt

Prologue: Summer 2009

Part One
1 Pink Houses and Panhandlers
2 Bottom-Feeders
3 Bourgeois Homeowners
4 Virtual Vehicle City
5 Bad Reputation
6 The Road to Prosperity
7 Bar Logic
8 Downward Mobility
9 Black and White
10 The Forest Primeval
11 The Naked Truth
12 The Toughest Job in Politics
13 Urban Homesteaders

Part Two
14 Quitters Never Win
15 Burning Down the House
16 Emotional Rescue
17 Get Real
18 Living Large
19 Fading Murals
20 Gun Club
21 Bargaining with God
22 Psycho Killer

Part Three
23 Winter Wonderland
24 Home on the Range
25 California Dreamin’
26 Thankless Task
27 Joy to the World

Epilogue: Summer 2012

Updates
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Further Reading
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.2.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• ISBN-10: 0-520-97640-1 / 0520976401
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-97640-5 / 9780520976405