
"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
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
"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
"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."
"[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
James M. Denham​
author of A Rogue’s Paradise: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida
About Jason
Select Media
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.
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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...
from The Swamp Peddlers:

Jason with WGCU/NPR host Mike Kiniry on Gulf Coast Life

Florida Book Club podcast with Chistopher Nank
Jason with author Craig Pittman at Tombolo Books,
St. Pete, FL
Contact
from The Yugo:


Jason on NPR's Weekend Edition with Guy Raz
Fox & Friends
from The Yucks!:

WBUR's
Only a Game

Fox Sports Radio with Steve Bortstein