Book club with Detroit books

We are hoping to start a new book club after the first of the year, a series of 4-5 scholarly books about Detroit using Tom Sugrue's award-winning "Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" as the cornerstone. We'll read one book and meet once per month. If you are interested please join the Facebook group so you can be kept in the loop. Thanks!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/g...d=167673362267

Facebook description:
We will start with a sequence of 5 scholarly books with Sugrue's award-winning "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" as the cornerstone. Altogether, these books discuss race, inequality, and labor in Detroit from 1880 through the 1990s. We will discuss one book per month from January - May, and start a new book sequence relevant to Detroit in September. If there is enough interest we may run more than one section.

If you are interested, please join this group and you'll receive email updates. Our first order of business will be to select a location and meeting times, hopefully by early December.

January:
Zunz, O [[1982). The changing face of inequality: Urbanization, industrial development, and immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920.

February:
Boyle, K [[2004). Arc of justice: A saga of race, civil rights, and murder in the jazz age.

March:
Sugrue, T [[1996). The origins of the urban crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit.

April:
Thompson, H [[2001). Whose Detroit? Politics, labor, and race in a modern American city.

May:
TBD

Race seems to be a prominent theme. It's in the title of every book. Heavy reading!

Yes, these books are heavy reading, that is for sure.

Wait, are you starting with Sugrue or Zunz?

I have all of those titles and only Boyle's is "readable". The others have good information although I couldn't read more than a few pages of Whose Detroit? without falling asleep. Anyone with a full time job is going to be taxed to read those within a month.

It seems like you book club idea could be more interesting, if you mixed in some fiction about Detroit, some books about Detroit music. You could then see how some of the "heavier" books illuminated the ligher books. And someone might actually make it through the reading list.

I have just finished the "Origins of the Urban Crisis," very good book. I particularly liked the graphs.