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Book Cover for: How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, Aaron Foley

How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass

Aaron Foley

In one of Curbed: Detroit's Top 11 Books about Detroit, Aaron Foley, editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook, offers the definitive inside look at one of America's most talked-about and least understood cities.

With a wry sense of humor, Foley, a native Detroiter, walks you through the most difficult questions about the Motor City, offering seven simple rules for making it there. Perfect for coastal transplants, wary suburbanites, unwitting gentrifiers, or start-up disruptors, this recently updated guidebook offers advice on everything from the glories of Vernors ginger ale to how to rehab a house to how to not sound like an uninformed racist. In twenty short chapters, Foley walks you through:

- How Detroiters do business

- The unofficial guide to enjoying Faygo

- How to be gay in Detroit

- How to raise a Detroit kid

- How to party in Detroit.

Both hilarious and insightful, this no-frills look at Motown is written for those who live there but also, as Vanity Fair put it, "for anyone participating in contemporary global urbanization who would like to avoid behaving like a subjugating dick."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Belt Publishing
  • Publish Date: Oct 2nd, 2018
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - 0002
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.90in - 0.70in - 0.95lb
  • EAN: 9781948742313
  • Recommended age: 17-UP
  • Categories: United States - Midwest - East North Central (IL, IN, MI, OHSociology - UrbanPublic Policy - City Planning & Urban Development

About the Author

Foley, Aaron: - Aaron Foley grew up in Detroit, which gives him more street cred than a lot of others. He has written about Detroit for several local and national publications including CNN, Jalopnik, and MLive. He is the editor of The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook and was appointed Detroit's first Chief Storyteller by Mayor Mike Duggan in 2017. He (still) lives in Detroit.

Praise for this book

"Aaron Foley possesses a preternatural ability to parse issues of race, class, urbanism, and pop culture in a complex and generous way that avoids tired orthodoxies and knee-jerk justifications but is always on the proper side of social justice." --Vanity Fair
The picture Foley paints isn't always pretty, but it's always real. All readers -- native Detroiters and new arrivals, citizens of America and residents of outer Mongolia -- should thank him for telling it like it is. Isn't that what all books are supposed to do? --The Millions