{"title":"Earl Swift","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the incisive non-fiction of Earl Swift, where meticulous research meets compelling storytelling. Delve into forgotten histories and contemporary explorations, perfect for readers of Erik Larson or Jon Krakauer.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"chesapeake-requiem-book-earl-swift-9780062661401","title":"Chesapeake Requiem","description":"\u003cp\u003eTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a two-hundred-year-old crabbing community in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post, NPR, Outside, Smithsonian, Bloomberg, Science Friday, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Review of Books, and Kirkus \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"BEAUTIFUL, HAUNTING AND TRUE.\" -- Hampton Sides *  \"GORGEOUS. A TRULY REMARKABLE BOOK.\" -- Beth Macy * \"GRIPPING. FANTASTIC.\" -- Outside * \"CAPTIVATING.\" -- Washington Post * \"POWERFUL.\" -- Bill McKibben * \"VIVID. HARROWING AND MOVING.\" -- Science * \"A MASTERFUL NARRATIVE.\" -- Christian Science Monitor * \"THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR.\"  -- Stephen L. Carter\/Bloomberg\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. They are separated from their countrymen by the nation's largest estuary, and a twelve-mile boat trip across often tempestuous water--the same water that for generations has made Tangier's fleet of small fishing boats 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eYet for all of its long history, and despite its tenacity, Tangier is disappearing. The very water that has long sustained it is erasing the island day by day, wave by wave. It has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850, and still its shoreline retreats by fifteen feet a year--meaning this storied place will likely succumb first among U.S. towns to the effects of climate change. Experts reckon that, barring heroic intervention by the federal government, islanders could be forced to abandon their home within twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the graves of their forebears are being sprung open by encroaching tides, and the conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.   \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island's past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier's people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways. 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A TRULY REMARKABLE BOOK.\" -- Beth Macy * \"GRIPPING. FANTASTIC.\" -- Outside * \"CAPTIVATING.\" -- Washington Post * \"POWERFUL.\" -- Bill McKibben * \"VIVID. HARROWING AND MOVING.\" -- Science * \"A MASTERFUL NARRATIVE.\" -- Christian Science Monitor * \"THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR.\"  -- Stephen L. Carter\/Bloomberg\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTangier Island, Virginia, is a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the American Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud is home to 470 hardy people who live an isolated and challenging existence, with one foot in the 21st century and another in times long passed. 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Meanwhile, the graves of their forebears are being sprung open by encroaching tides, and the conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.   \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island's past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier's people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways. 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The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson's lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists--then redeemed himself in spectacular fashion with the \"Murder Farm\" affair.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe result is a detailed work of Southern history that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice. 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In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself - he hoped not literally - in the river and its history. What Swift survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his sidekick Martin - whose photographs accompany the text - Swift points his how through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay. 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Its mission combines old-fashioned bushwhacking and detective work with the latest in forensic technology.\u003cbr\u003e Earl Swift accompanies a CILHI team into the Laotian jungle on a search for the remains of Major Jack Barker and his three-man crew, whose chopper went down in a fireball more than thirty years ago. He interweaves the story of the recovery team's work with a tense account of Barker's fatal attempt to rescue trapped soldiers during the largest helicopter assault in history. Swift is the first reporter ever allowed to follow a recovery mission, as these unique archaeological digs are called, in its entirety, and he got his hands dirty, combing the jungle floor for clues amid vipers, monsoons, and unexploded bombs.\u003cbr\u003e Where They Lay resounds with admiration for those who fell and those who seek them. But Swift also raises hard questions about these recovery missions. Is it worth $100 million a year to try to bring home the lost from old wars? 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Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that exposed the dark underbelly of the Jim Crow era to a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.  By turns a riveting police procedural, gripping courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. 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In 1990, a youthful Earl Swift backpacked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, a transformative experience that colored every aspect of his later life. He emerged from his hike across the rugged, sky-high roof of fourteen eastern states a sharper and more organized thinker, a better problem solver, and a committed outdoorsman.  But he also left the AT with baggage: Early in his odyssey, he spent time with a couple of other southbounders, who were friendly, capable, and doing everything right, but who were nonetheless murdered weeks later at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania—a fit of violence that the killer never explained.  Half a lifetime later, Swift returned to the trail to find out whether he was still, in his sixties, equal to the AT’s roller-coaster terrain. Driving him, too, was a quest for answers that had nagged at him since that first hike: What had happened at that campsite to turn two smart, bighearted people into prey? 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