I had never heard of Charlie LeDuff until last week when this interview showed up in my YouTube feed. Spasiba Comrade Putin!
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT_GOWnMgQM&t=1072s width:600 height:360]

So, naturally, after seeing that interview I checked out a copy of his book, Detroit: An American Autopsy which came out in 2013. I gotta' say, Charlie writes pretty good. From the prologue:

But Detroit can no longer be ignored, because what happened here is happening out there. Neighborhoods from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Miami are blighted with empty houses and people with idle hands. Americans are swimming in debt, and the prospects of servicing the debt grow slimmer by the day as good-paying jobs continue to evaporate or relocate to foreign lands. Economists talk about the inevitable turnaround. But standing here in Michigan, it seems to me that the fundamentals are no longer there to make the good life.
Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.
In cities and towns across the country, whole factories are auctioned off. Men with trucks haul away tool-and-die machines, aluminum siding, hoists, drinking fountains. It is ripping out the country’s mechanical heart right before our eyes.
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This is not a book about geopolitics or macroeconomics or global finance. And it is not a feel-good story with a happy ending. It is a book of reportage. A memoir of a reporter returning home - only he cannot find the home he once knew. This is a book about living people getting on with the business of surviving in a place that has little use for anyone anymore except those left here. It is about waking up one morning and being told you are obsolete and not wanting to believe it but knowing it’s true. It is a book about a rough town and a tough people during arguably some of the most historic and cataclysmic years in the American experience. It is a book about family and cops and criminals and factory workers. It is about corrupt politicians and a collapsing newspaper. It is about angry people fighting and crying and snatching hold of one another trying to stay alive.
It is about the future of America and our desperate efforts to save ourselves form it.
At the end of the day, the Detroiter may be the most important American there is because no one knows better than he that we’re all standing at the edge of the shaft.

He has a YouTube channel, you can check out his videos here: The Americans with Charlie LeDuff/videos
Here are some of my favorites:
Happy 20th Anniversary, NAFTA! (6 min.)
The Corridor of Pain: Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Newark (6 min.)
Hey Americans, Come Take Our Jobs! (6 min.)
Charlie LeDuff Golfs the Length of Detroit (10 min.)
One more quote from the book. He's talking about a woman named Britta McNeal whose two teenage sons had been shot and killed.

The daughter of an autoworker and a home nurse, McNeal grew up in the promise of the black middle class that Detroit once offered. But McNeal messed up, she admits as much. She got pregnant at fifteen. She later went to nursing school but got sidetracked by her own health problems. School wasn't a priority. Besides, there was always a job in America when you needed one.
Until there wasn't. Like so many across the country, she's being evicted with no job and no place to go.
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It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for the police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can’t keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist’s match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children’s milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn’t manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation’s children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton ?
Can she be blamed for that ?