Detroit's Street Railways tells the story of public transportation in the Motor City. Dating back to 1863, when horse-drawn streetcars serviced the citizenry, public transportation in Detroit has a proud and colorful history. Early on, a host of streetcar companies carried Detroiters about their daily business. This period was followed by consolidation into one company, the Detroit United Railway, and later the establishment of the municipally owned Department of Street Railways. The Department of Street Railways, established May 15, 1922, inherited a vast system of streetcar lines throughout Detroit, the first city in the United States to establish municipally owned transit system. It was a leader and innovator in the transit industry, with continued streetcar service until April 8, 1956, when the last streetcars on Woodward Avenue were replaced by buses. When the Department of Street Railways began coach operations in 1925, the intent was to provide feeder service to the established streetcar lines, as expansion costs were prohibitive. Sadly, the program implemented to complement the city's streetcar operations led to the demise of the streetcar as the principal mode of transportation in the Motor City.

If Detroit was characterized as "The Paris of the Midwest" at the turn of the 20th century, then Grosse Pointe was the Riviera. There wealthy summer colonists, influential transplants from the bustle of the metropolis, founded private clubs where they could pursue polite pleasures and high society soirees away from the honky-tonk atmosphere of the area roadhouses which shared the shoreline of Lake St. Clair. Architecturally significant mansions on rambling estates soon replaced quaint French farm houses a nd gingerbread "cottages." As the good times rolled, no one was willing to let a little thing like Prohibition spoil the fun! The fact that the residents' elegant yachts and iceboats had to share the waters with rumrunners and federal agents only added to the excitement of an area fast becoming one of America's premier suburban enclaves. This new publication successfully captures the magical spirit of the Pointes. With photographs from personal and public collections, the authors have painted a wonderful picture of what it was like to live in Grosse Pointe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

William Stocking, Gordon K. Miller - Associate Editor.

The second volume in the Handbook of American Business History series, this book offers concise histories of extractive, manufacturing, and service industries as well as extensive bibliographic essays pointing to the leading sources on each industry and bibliographic checklists. Supplementing other bibliographic materials in business history, this volume provides researchers with a much needed path through the vast array of material available in the library and on the Internet. Indicating which resources to check and which to bypass, the book is a guide to a sometimes overwhelming amount of information. Each of the book's chapters provides a concise industry history, beginning with the industry's rise to importance in the U.S. and continuing to the present. The bibliographic essays provide a narrative outline of the leading sources published or made available in archives, libraries, or museum collections since 1971, when Lovett's American Economic and Business History Information Sources was published. Each discussion concludes with a bibliographic checklist of the titles mentioned in the essay as well as other titles. In a rapidly expanding information society, researchers, teachers, and students may be easily overwhelmed by the exhaustive material available in print and electronically. What is useful and what can be ignored is a strategic question, and few know where to begin. This book provides a guide.