Made In Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

I noticed a book on Al Mohler's Reading List that caught my attention and brought back a lot of great memories. My experience was more about "Cruising Woodward", hearing the thrilling sounds of the hot machines and checking out the latest "stuff" out of motown and the auto companies and the local speed shops! Living right across the border in Windsor though, there was a lot of similarities in our neighborhoods with those of us working in the auto industry and on our cars back in the 70's and 80's. Race relations was not a problem for us on this side of the river though. My.... how times have changed for the auto industry and it's sad to see what is happening today. Anyway this is a review below by Al Mohler of a book about a father and son that hits close to home.

That is what makes Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Paul Clemens such a refreshing surprise. Clemens, who grew up in one of Detroit's transitional neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s, saw the city transformed before his eyes and came to know his father as the great Gibraltar that held his family together. Clemens's father appears as a normal dad in the context of his working-class neighborhood. Dads were just there and they did what they had to do for their families. They may have been short tempered at times, but they were occasionally capable of much fun with their children and they showed their absolute dedication to family by the fact that they gave themselves to such hard work under such difficult circumstances. More often than not, they were tired to the bone, even as they had to patch a wall or discipline a son. As Paul Clemens relates, fathers in his neighborhood demonstrated a central task of manhood by doing what, under almost any circumstance, just had to be done.

He writes: "Families were fundamental to the way the area was organized, which is not to say that anyone spent much time getting sentimental over them as a concept. Families were viewed like most other things in this life, which is to say as sometimes dreary and ultimately disappointing, but preferable to a long list of even less desirable alternatives. . . Though they cursed aloud while doing so -- and, internally, likely cursed the days they'd wed our mothers and fathered us -- the men in our neighborhood, whether in hats and gloves during the dead of winter, or sweating and swearing up a storm in the middle of the summer, somehow manage to fix broken carburetors, replace drafty windows, and keep basement furnace is going a little bit longer, while their wives bought box after box of whatever was on sale and saw to it that their children didn't waste all their money at McDonald's. . ."

In his own way, in Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens demonstrates a model of respecting and honoring his father while telling the story, warts and all. His book is unique in being both gritty and sweet. I would suggest that Christian men -- and fathers in particular -- would do well to read this kind of literature. These secular memoirs, filled with both pain and promise, tell us a great deal about the world around us and, at the same time, remind us of our own calling -- even as we hear that voice through words of pain.

Happy Father's Day. Let's be sure our children hear our voices and know our love.