Globe Pequot / Lyons Press
Pages: 320
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4930-1570-2 • Hardback • June 2016 • $26.00 • (£19.95)
978-1-4930-3058-3 • Paperback • August 2017 • $17.95 • (£13.95)
978-1-4930-1818-5 • eBook • June 2016 • $16.99 • (£12.95)
Tom Stanton is the author of several nonfiction books, among them the critically acclaimed memoir The Final Season and the Quill Award finalist Ty and The Babe. A longtime journalist, he teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy. Stanton co-founded and edited the suburban Detroit Voice newspapers, winning state and national press awards, including a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He and wife Beth Bagley-Stanton live in New Baltimore, Michigan.
“Once in a blue moon, a city bears witness to the best and the worst of times. Such was Detroit’s fate more than a generation ago as the Tigers, Lions and Red Wings reached new sports heights while the Black Legion too often ruled the night. It’s a great tale and Tom Stanton has done a marvelous job telling it.”
—Tim Wendel, author of Summer of ’68
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"Today, Detroit is a shadow of its former self. This fascinating book reveals what an astonishing place it formerly was. Eight decades ago, it was a boiling cauldron of social extremism, extravagant criminality, and athletic excellence. Readers of this book have a new understanding of the city and the Thirties."
—George F. Will
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“Tom Stanton’s absorbingly detailed work entwines the best and the worst of Detroit during the Depression. Readers will find themselves cheering the sports heroes and rooting against the Black Legion, a fascinatingly bizarre bunch whose sudden leap into the headlines inspired a wave of national hysteria. Stanton has deftly recreated one of the most farfetched episodes of the Motor City’s never-dull past.”
—Richard Bak, author of Detroitland and Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope
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“With the racist Black Legion spreading evil and the rambunctious Detroit Tigers bringing joy, Detroit’s seemingly eternal forces of darkness and light coexist in this captivating slice of American history.”
—David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi
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(starred review) A veteran journalist uses a variety of lenses to illuminate the dark story of the Black Legion, an association of murderous (white) domestic terrorists who briefly thrived in the upper Midwest. Stanton unfolds the history of the Legion gradually, always keeping it in the social, cultural, and economic context of the area where it was born and grew…. First-rate reporting and a seminar in how to employ context in investigative and historical journalism.
— Kirkus