Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back By Mark Slobin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019

Slobin uses his memories and life as a starting point and then ventures into sources that range from interviews to archival sources and a wide range of secondary writings. The place of car manufacturing thus looms throughout many of the book's pages and even provides the conceptual frame for the book, as Slobin applies the metaphor of motorized transportation to his analysis. Elsewhere Detroit has taken on a near mythic quality, exemplified by things like Shinola murals in Soho evoking the city's mechanistic profile (208). [...]the metaphor of Detroit's inseparable relationship with the post–World War II automobile industry is, in fact, infused throughout the contents of the book in a deeper way than even Slobin might realize.