David Maraniss 'Once in a Great City' Book Signing

October 3 2015 | 11:00am to October 4 2015 | 12:55pm

Meet David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the new book Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, at the Detroit Historical Museum for a special book signing event on Saturday, October 3. 

11 a.m.: Discussion of the book with the author moderated by Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Mark Cavanagh, the son of Jerome Cavanagh, Detroit's mayor in 1963.

Noon: Book sales and signing 

The discussion will take place in the Louise C. Booth Auditorium and books will be sold in the museum store, while supplies last.

About the book: It’s 1963 and Detroit seems on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America. The auto industry is selling more cars than ever before. Gordy’s Motown records has America dancing in the streets. Yet David Maraniss, one of our nation’s most illustrious historians, shows that the shadows of Detroit's collapse were evident even at its peak. With Once in a Great City, Maraniss, who was born in Detroit, details a city was threatened by its own design. Despite its leaders' insistence on developing “urban renewal,” unfair housing laws kept communities segregated, labor struggles changed employment prospects, and Woodward Avenue divided not just east and west but “haves and have-nots.” Maraniss shows that Detroit in 1963 reflected the spirit of the entire country at the time, and its complicated past and future decline would be traced to this era.

Born in Detroit, David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post. Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and bestselling author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill ClintonRome 1960: The Olympics that Stirred the World; Barack Obama: The StoryClemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero; They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi which was hailed by Sports Illustrated as “maybe the best sports biography ever published.” He lives in Washington, DC, and Madison, WI.