Davis has started running with some very fast company. But such slips do nothing to dull the luster of this important book. A competent copy editor would have caught such slips, but that doesn’t mitigate the damage they do to a writer’s authority. And she describes trips across the Ambassador Bridge to eat at Chinese restaurants in Quebec, while the Ambassador Bridge connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Davis writes that her mother drove a Pontiac Riviera, while GM’s Buick division produced the elegant Riviera. This book, for all its abundant strengths, does have flaws. Davis doesn’t try to sugarcoat her hometown’s exhaustively documented ill. partly a love letter to a larger-than-life woman and partly an explanation and defense of the 'lucrative shadow economy' of the numbers game, which was an ingenious way for African Americans to circumvent the economic barriers white society had placed in their path.
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