The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers

You might think a memoir of growing up in the middle of Detroit's illegal underground numbers racket might be gritty and grim, but Davis's story is, pointedly, just the opposite. Told through a loving daughter's eyes (with an affection even more evident in her sweet, soft voice in the audiobook), it's a heroic tale of a brilliant, generous woman who wrested a bourgeois life for her family out of the most unpromising soil. Davis recalls the modest splendor of her childhood with understandable pride—the words "myriad" and "plethora" appear again and again—and rarely has hard-earned financial independence seemed like such a political act.