The Way-Back Room: A Memoir of a Detroit Childhood

Don't let the title fool you. Mary Minock's new book certainly evokes 1950's Detroit. Her father works for Cadillac, smells of "cigarettes and steel," and dies young of a brain tumor. The old neighborhood on Clark Street is working class, first and second generation immigrant families, transplanted Southern folk, all mostly white, mostly Catholic, but starting to lean more and more Protestant. Teenage Mary walks across the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, as if that Canadian town were a suburb...