EARL SWIFT
JOURNALIST and AUTHOR
BOOKS
Tangier, Virginia: a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud and marsh is home to 470 hardy people who live with one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed.
They are separated from their countrymen by twelve miles of often tempestuous water—water that for generations has made them a chief source for the rightly prized Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and has lent the island its claim to fame as the softshell crab capital of the world.
Chesapeake Requiem
A Year with the Watermen
of Vanishing Tangier Island
But the very water that has long sustained Tangier now erases it day by day, wave by wave, as the island sinks and the bay rises. Experts reckon that islanders will soon be forced to abandon their homes. Conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.
Chesapeake Requiem takes an intimate look at the island’s past, present, and tenuous future, and sounds a warning on the coming fate of countless coastal communities.
New York Times Best Seller
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by
The Washington Post
NPR
Kirkus Reviews
Christian Science Monitor
Esquire
Smithsonian
Outside
Public radio's "Science Friday"
One Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks.
Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror emerged: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions every bit as dire as those before the Civil War.
Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.
Hell Put to Shame
THE 1921 MURDER FARM MASSACRE
AND THE HORROR OF AMERICA'S SECOND SLAVERY
PROPULSIVE . . . THE EASE OF READING SWIFT'S EFFICIENT PROSE BELIES ITS ELEGANCE . . . THIS IS A MUST READ. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
AN OUTSTANDING AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BLEND OF HISTORY, POLICE PROCEDURAL, AND COURTROOM DRAMA. -- Library Journal
A classic '57 Chevy, in wretched shape. Its few patches of surviving paint are sun-bleached and salt-pocked and cracked like a dry lakebed. Its interior is stripped to bare and rotting steel, floorboards chewed away, the whole layered in a thick carpet of grime and flaking metal. Birds have nested in its driver's seat. Its engine, or what's left of it, hasn't turned over in years.
Slumped among hundreds of other rusting hulks on a treeless, windswept patch of eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age optimism that made it the most beloved and instantly recognizable car to ever roll off an assembly line. It's thrashed. A goner. There's little left to scrap, let alone save.
But to Tommy Arney, a man who's been written off as a ruin himself, the Chevy isn't junk--it's history, especially so because its rusted metal conceals a rare asset: a complete provenance through twelve previous owners. Hounded by banks, the local sheriff, the FBI, and his own volatile demons, Arney embarks on a mission to save the car and preserve the long record of human experience it carries in its steel and upholstery.
Auto Biography charts the shifting dreams and fortunes of the people who have gripped the wagon's steering wheel. Written for both gearheads and Sunday drivers, it captures the sturdy resilience of the American dream and our strange and abiding relationship with the automobile.
Auto biography
A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream
THE BEST CONTEMPORARY BOOK I'VE READ ABOUT AUTOMOBILES SINCE A.J. BAIME'S GO LIKE HELL.--Matt Hardigree, JALOPNIK
“I’VE NEVER MET EARL SWIFT, BUT FROM THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THIS BOOK I LIKE HIM. AUTO BIOGRAPHY IS EXUBERANT, BIG-SPIRITED, AND MORE THAN OCCASIONALLY PROFOUND.
--Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
FULL OF CRACKERJACK REPORTING AND FUEL-INJECTED MIRTH. . . . AS NAIL-BITING AS ANY DRUGSTORE ACTION-THRILLER. IT'S HARD TO CONCEIVE OF A MORE RIVETING (OR UNRIVETING) WORK ON THE SUBJECT.
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Where They Lay
Searching for America's Lost Soldiers
In March 1971, an American helicopter exploded in the sky over Laos and fell on ground so busy with North Vietnamese troops that its pilots and gunners were left where they lay—four among the 2,583 servicemen whose bodies remained unrecovered at war’s end.
Now, thirty years on, a team of soldiers and scientists choppers into the jungle on a search for what remains of Major Jack Barker and his crew. Its mission: dig into ground slick from monsoon rains, among unexploded bombs, vipers and scorpions, to find the four, bring them home and put names—the right names—on their headstones.
A BOOK ABOUT LOST SOLDIERS, BONES, MEMORY, 'SCIENCE AFOOT,' AND OF COURSE THE WAR THAT TOOK PLACE IN THE HIGH WEEDS OF VIETNAM . . . TOLD SO BEAUTIFULLY, SO HAUNTINGLY, AND SO UNFORGETTABLY.--Wil Haygood, Washington Post
A POIGNANT TALE OF ONE WAR AND FOUR LOST LIVES. AND THE STORY OF ALL WHO NEVER CAME BACK.--James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers
COMPELLING, SERIOUS, MORALLY EXIGENT, AND WELL TOLD.
--Finalist citation for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award
NANSEN CRATER, 8:36 P.M., DECEMBER 12, 1972; The last two men to walk on the moon, Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt, braked their Lunar Roving Vehicle to a stop. They had arrived at the outermost edge of mankind's travels, having flown narly a quarter-mile through space, then driven five miles from their landing craft to reach this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander.
In the decades since, the exploits of the astronauts on the final Apollo expeditions have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first moon landing. But Apollo 11 was but a prelude to what came later: While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a sliver of flat lunar desert smaller than a football field, Apollos 15, 16, and 17 each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan. All told, their crews traveled fifty-six miles, and brought deep science and a far more swashbuckling style of exploration to the moon. And they triumped for one very American reason: They drove.
A JOY TO READ FROM BEGINNING TO END.--Wall Street Journal
THRILLING . . . . UP-END(S) THE APOLLO NARRATIVE ENTIRELY SO THAT EVERY EARLIER AMERICAN VENTURE INTO SPACE WAS PREPARATION FOR THE LAST THREE TRIPS TO THE MOON . . . . ABOVE ALL A HUMAN STORY, AND A TRIUMPHANT ONE AT THAT.--The Times (London)
Across the Airless Wilds
The Lunar Rover and the
Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
The Big Roads
The Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers
Who Created the American Superhighways
Man-made wonders, economic pipelines, agents of sprawl, uniquely American sirens of escape--the interstates are all of these, and after a half-century snake into every aspect of modern life. The Big Roads charts the creation of these landmark highways. From the speed demon who inspired a primitive web of dirt auto trails, to the cadre of largely forgotten technocrats who planned the interstates years before Ike reached the White House, to the thousands of city dwellers who resisted the concrete juggernaut when it bore down on their neighborhoods,
The Big Roads follows a winding, fascinating route through
twentieth-century America.
OBJECTS IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR PROVE EERILY CLOSE ON EVERY PAGE OF THIS LIVELY, EMINENTLY SENSIBLE HISTORY OF THE GUARDRAILED MONUMENT TO AMERICAN MOBILITY.
--John R. Stilgoe, author of Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape
SWIFT HAS ADDED TEXTURE AND NUANCE, AS WELL AS NARRATIVE ECONOMY, TO A STORY CONTAINING VOLUMES, AND HE MAKES FOR AN IDEAL TRAVELING COMPANION.
--New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
JOURNEY on the JAMES
Three Weeks through the Heart of Virginia
No feature of the American landscape has witnessed so much of the nation’s history as Virginia’s James River: the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, key battles in three wars, early fights between white settlers and Indians, and the country’s first mines, factories, hospitals, farms and forts.
Part history, part travelogue, part adventure yarn, Journey on the James sends readers down the 435-mile river in a plastic canoe—and through a past that most of us didn’t read about in school.
PERFECTLY ENCHANTING . . . . TOLD WITH WIT, INTELLIGENCE, AND A JOURNALIST'S SENSE OF INTEGRITY, THIS BOOK IS A TREASURE FOR ANYONE WHO LOVES THE OLD DOMINION.
--Virginia Quarterly Review
A LIVELY AND COLORFUL RECAP OF A JOURNEY SAVORED HOUR BY HOUR . . . . SWIFT'S SUPERB WRITING WILL ENGAGE AND HOLD THE READER FROM PAGE ONE TO THE END.--Richmond Times-Dispatch