He is also the author of seven other books, among them the New York Times best seller CHESAPEAKE REQUIEM (HarperCollins, 2018), the story of an island town threatened with extinction by the very water that has sustained it for 240 years AUTO BIOGRAPHY (HarperCollins, 2014), a narrative journey through postwar America told through a single old car and the fourteen people who've owned it THE BIG ROADS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), an armchair history of the U.S. Longtime journalist Earl Swift is the author of the forthcoming ACROSS THE AIRLESS WILDS: THE LUNAR ROVER AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE FINAL MOON LANDINGS, due from HarperCollins in July 2021. Readers who accompany him through his Journey on the James will come away with the accumulated pleasure, if not the bruises and mud, of four hundred miles of adventure and history in the life of one of America's great watersheds. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. 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 bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. 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. 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. 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. 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. From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any other feature of the American landscape - as home to the continent's first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil War, and birthplace of America's twentieth-century navy.

Chesapeake Requiem by Earl Swift