By Ruth Conniff.

• Position: Book review

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (Simon & Schuster) is David Maraniss's love letter to his hometown.

I had the pleasure of listening to Maraniss describe how he got the idea for the book at a Progressive fundraiser earlier this year, and he includes this charming story in an author's note.

He was in a bar in Manhattan, watching the Packers in the 2011 Super Bowl. (Maraniss, a Packers fan and Wisconsin resident, wrote the fantastic biography of the late Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered.) During a break in the game, he was suddenly captivated by a commercial that featured his birthplace.

"A series of images flashed by in rhythm to a pulsing soundtrack. Wintry landscape. Smokestacks. Abandoned factories. World-class architecture," Maraniss writes. Then the singer Eminem stepped from the black, leather interior of a Chrysler sedan and walked into Detroit's legendary Fox Theater, "down the aisle toward a black gospel choir, robed in red and black, their voices rising high and hopeful in the darkness from the floodlit stage. Then silence, and Eminem pointing at the camera: This is the Motor City. This is what we do."

Maraniss stood fixated, and choked up. Then, he says, his wife punched him in the arm. You idiot, she told him, you're crying over a car commercial.

Of course, what captured Maraniss was so much more. The story of Detroit, he points out, is the story of America. "The automobile, music, labor, civil rights, the middle class." It is an inspiring story, and a story of terrible loss. "Life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable," Maraniss writes.

The period he covers, when Detroit was at its zenith, tracks the rise of the auto industry, the UAW, Motown, American manufacturing and the black...