Home | Author Jason Vuic

"An exceptional account of...the mindless development of land at any cost."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"True genius...a fascinating story well told."

Car and Driver

"Vuic’s book is about bad football. And it’s very good."

Tampa Bay Times

"An impressively researched and deftly narrated tale..."

The Boston Globe

Coming Fall 2025!!!

University Press of Florida

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A Town without Pity is a dramatic account of Florida’s toughest locale--a town named Arcadia, ironically--which, in the 1980s, experienced two national news-making events: the first, the exoneration of Black migrant worker James Richardson, who spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit; and the second, the very public mistreatment of the HIV-positive Ray boys, 3 white, hemophilia-suffering brothers who contracted

AIDS and who were banished from school and church and forced to leave town after someone burned down their house. Their stories were heartbreaking, and for a time focused the public’s attention on Arcadia, whose cowboy roots, poor-wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history made it perhaps the most “out-of-place” place in Florida. This was a town without pity, which, during a 2-year period at the end of the Reagan era, was forced to confront not only the AIDS virus, but the remnants of a racist past.

What people are saying:

"A Florida backwater — twice thrust onto the national stage over controversies decades apart — is again centered in this fishbowl of a book, a page-turning examination of the machinations of a municipal mob under the nation’s microscope. The haunting questions that gurgle throughout: Can a place be bad, and what makes it so?"

Ben Montgomery

author of Grandma Gatewood's Walk

"Vuic brilliantly shows how one town in Florida exemplifies the worst as well as the best examples of the nation's responses to injustices. Written with great empathy and understanding of the human condition…A Town Without Pity should be required reading in all modern American history courses."

Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States

"A fascinating deep dive that grapples with some of the most pressing issues of the post-civil rights era in American history."

Brandon T. Jett

author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South

"A riveting account of how two 1980s events—the exoneration of a wrongfully-convicted Black man and communal fear over three white HIV-positive school boys—thrust an insular Florida community into the national spotlight."

James M. Denham

author of A Rogue’s Paradise: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida

"[A] tremendously readable book that spotlights two controversies that buffeted a small Florida town in the final decades of the twentieth century…. Vuic considers what these stories might mean today for this and countless other American towns still coming to grips with complex, painful, and often unpleasant pasts."

Paul Renfro

author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America

"A compelling story of miscarriages of justice and compassion, both in the same small town during overlapping times. It is eminently readable and unputdownable."

Mary E. Adkins author of Chesterfield Smith, America’s Lawyer

About Jason

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Originally from Punta Gorda, FL, Jason Vuic is an award-winning author and historian based in Fort Worth, Texas, who specializes in creative nonfiction.

He is a graduate of Wake Forest University and holds an M.A. in history from the University of Richmond and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University Bloomington.

His first book, The Yugo: the Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, received glowing reviews in over 100 print and web-based publications, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Car and Driver, Mother Jones, Wired, Slate, and Time...