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It makes sense when you think about it. The greatest reporters are usually obsessive, passionate, mean-spirited drunks. Charles LeDuff (non-fiction, Penguin Press) is admittedly all of those things. I was a reporter in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and New York and I know that the best work in journalism  is not always done by the nicest people. I was not usually very nice.  If fact, nice people don’t last long or get the big stories. You push, intrude, annoy, ignore, scheme, push and badger. Nobody really wants to see you or tolerate your poking around, not if you are doing your job. The nastiness on the Internet is nothing to anger and rejection reporters encounter every day of their lives, especially when they are on a crusade.

Le Duff is not a nice person, but he is a passionate on one and a great reporter. He was born in Detroit and worked for The New York Times for a decade before returning to his dying and beloved city Detroit to work for it’s dying evening newspaper The Detroit News. As the book explains, just about every institution in Detroit is dying, underfunded or failing to function. While most people ran from this story, LeDuff ran to it. He is now a TV reporter for Fox News 2 in Detroit and he has written a shocking,  wrenching and brilliantly written “autopsy,” as he calls it,  of Detroit’s horrible metamorphosis from one of America’s great, prosperous and beautiful cities into our very own Mumbai, only with less money and prosperity.

In Detroit, the population has fallen from 1.2 million to 700,000. Neighborhoods burn, blocks are devastated and in ruins,  businesses, jobs, factories and middle-class people have fled, thousands of squatters occupy disintegrating homes. More than half of the city is unemployed. More than 250 bodies are stacked up in the city’s morgue because nobody can pay for the funerals of their loved ones. Students going to public schools have to bring their own toilet paper if they need to use the bathroom. The brass poles in firehouses have been stripped and sold and the fire trucks are broken and barely function. Firehouses have been closed or are short of staff. This is the one city in America where the police don’t always come when you call them – there are too few vehicles, not enough officers and many of their cars are more than a decade old. It can take ambulances hours to arrive, if they come at all if you call and often the police can’t make it for days, if they come at all.

The city’s streets are wracked with poverty, homelessness,  racial exploitation, drugs and epidemic gun violence and there not a single supermarket left in the city limits. This is only a partial list of the horrors LeDuff recounts in this powerful and classic work of journalism. LeDuff refuses to give up on his the lost cause of his craft or the even more hopeless collapse of his city, even though nobody really wants to hear about Detroit, not in Michigan, not in Washington, not anywhere. He hammers away at corruption, cruelty and indifference and reminds us what a staggering loss the demise of journalism in American is for our civic awareness and good. Journalism today consists mostly of people arguing on television or blogs and the corruption, brutality, racial exploitation and staggering suffering he chronicles in Detroit go unremarked on and in part because nobody is spending much time or money telling us about them. The “left” and the “right on cable news don’t leave their studios to do much reporting and you will go a long ways before you hear about Detroit on CNN, Fox News or MSNBC.

This is an amazing book, a work of great passion, remarkable reporting, and the determination, willfulness and passion of a journalist who never claims to be perfect – he is as tough on  himself as he is on lazy and corrupt politicians  –  but he never stops trying to do the right thing: talk to the powerless, speak for them, torment the powerful and entrenched and indifferent.  There is a saying in journalism that the job of the reporter is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. That ethos is as dead as Detroit for most of the media, but not for LeDuff. People die every day in Detroit because nobody cares enough to help them, he writes,  from the mothers mourning their children gunned down in the street to the people who die of heart attacks and burn in their homes because there aren’t enough firemen in working trucks and ambulances running to come to help them. The mothers of Detroit not only see their children get shot but they have to watch them bleed to death in the street for hours as well.

Whole sections of the city have returned to the wild, inhabited by polecats and coyotes and roaming animals and rodents. Skeletal remains of once beautiful buildings dog the city. Foreign journalists troop into Detroit regularly to chronicle the decline of American economic power, will,  and conscience. The great factories of the city, its public buildings and beautiful old cinemas rot and crumble, burned again and again by scrappers looking for any piece of metal to sell. Political leaders go to jail, one after another, usually after stealing the citizens of the city blind for years.

In New York City last month, there was a national uproar because an ambulance took 10 minutes to get to a heart attack victim. Public officials scrambled to do better. People die in Detroit every day for the same reason, yet I have heard or read little about it, especially when compared to Justin Bieber’s dating problems or fiscal cliffs. This book is not just about Detroit, but about the American experience. It is a chilling call to pay attention to how far we have fallen in caring for our poorest people, and perhaps what the future holds for many other cities in America when journalism dies, jobs flee, the new economic system fails everyone but its owners, politicians betray their trust, and the people’s conscience is distracted by 200 channels of TV, Facebook and smartphones.

The tough thing about this book is that it might make you embarrassed to live in this country. The devastation and suffering in Detroit is a new chapter in American history. I’m not sure I wish to live in a country which tolerates Detroit while the stock market sails past 14,000. In one chapter, LeDuff is alerted by a frustrated police officer to the existence of a body frozen in an elevator shaft in an abandoned warehouse. He rushes to the scene, horrified to see a man’s legs sticking out of the ice. Squatters tell him he’s been there for a week or two and they’ve been calling the police for days.  LeDuff – a reporter for a major newspaper, immediately calls 911 – it still takes them two days to show up. Later in the book, a minister firefighter – and friend of LeDuff’s – suffocates to death in a house fire because firemen in Detroit don’t have working electronic “locators” every fireman in the U.S. wears.

LeDuff did not hide from Detroit. He is sticking it out. He vows to stay in Detroit and tell the story of that city in any way he can for as long as he can. I started reading this book Saturday afternoon and put it down at 3 a.m. Sunday.  I just could not put this book down. It did not help me sleep either.  Detroit in LeDuff’s hands is a great story, but unlike many great journalists, he is also a great and instinctive writer. There is no pause in this book. It’s like Tom Paine, or even Tolstoy came back in time to capture the nightmare and outrage that is modern-day Detroit.  There are many great stories in the book, but at its core if the astonishing determination of a reporter to tell the truth. When somebody calls for help in America, he writes, somebody needs to come.  This story is also very personal for LeDuff.  Detroit claimed his sister to drugs, his mother’s sanity when her shop was robbed and burned and it drove his brothers to the edge. Detroit is an awful story, but it is a great story as told in “Detroit.

I gasped at some of the stories, shook my head at others.   I teared up more than once reading this book – for the people in Detroit, for the decimated craft of journalism and what it’s demise means for people in America. And for the political leadership – and citizens – of a country that doesn’t seem to care much about this catastrophe in the heart of the country.  LeDuff is one of the most authentic voices I have ever read and the most poignant reminder of what journalism used to be and perhaps will be again.

If just one person, he writes, calls for help and gets it, then his work will be worthwhile. Amen to that.