BOOKS
TRAPPED UNDER THE SEA
The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results
Boston once had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.”
In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, leaders sent a team of commercial divers on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. A national and No. 1 Boston Globe bestseller..
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Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death.
An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls “extraordinary” and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe.
Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.
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Penguin Random House • IndieBound • Barnes & Noble • Amazon • Target
Sampling of Media Coverage
Interview on Living in Earth , which airs nationally on public radio.
Interview on NPR station WBUR.
“NONFICTION for $800”
Trapped featured as a clue on Jeopardy!
THE ASSIST
Jack O'Brien is a high school basketball coach extreme in both his demands and his devotion. With monastic discipline, he has built a powerhouse program that wins state championships year after year while helping propel players to college.
The Assist is a gripping, surprising story about fathers, sons and surrogates, all confronting the narrow margins of urban life. The book follows the players on their hunt for a state title. But it also stays with them, to see how young men who seldom get second chances survive without their coach hovering over them—and how he survives without them. A No. 1 Boston Globe bestseller.
More on the mentoring and scholarship nonprofit that grew out of The Assist
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LAST LION: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly. But Ted Kennedy -- the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's impossible expectations -- would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism.
Neil and several of his Boston Globe colleagues teamed up as coauthors of this revealing New York Times bestselling biography of the last Kennedy brother, the flawed vessel for family ambition who became the champion of a generation's dreams.
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He quickly failed in spectacular fashion. Late one night in the summer of 1969, he left the scene of a fatal automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The death there of a young woman from his brother's campaign would haunt and ultimately doom his presidential ambitions. Political rivals turned his all-too-human failings -- drinking, philandering, and divorce -- into a condemnation of his liberal politics.
But as the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally liberated from the expectations of others, free to become his own man. Once a symbol of youthful folly and nepotism, he transformed himself in his later years into a symbol of wisdom and perseverance. He built a deeply loving marriage with his second wife, Victoria Reggie. He embraced his role as the family patriarch. And as his health failed, he anointed the young and ambitious presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom many commentators compared to his brother Jack. The Kennedy brand of liberalism was rediscovered by a new generation of Americans.
Perceptive and carefully reported, drawing heavily from candid interviews with the Kennedy family and inner circle, Last Lion captures magnificently the life and historic achievements of Ted Kennedy, as well as the personal redemption that he found.
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LIFTING THE VEIL ON ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT
Neil has contributed a chapter to a new book published by Harvard Education Press about the field of enrollment management. In it, he tracks the growth of the field and the corresponding emergence of the U.S. News college rankings, and how those forces combined to reshape higher education, in profound and sometimes disturbing ways.
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Harvard Education Press
OUR BOSTON: Writers Celebrate the City They Love
Our Boston pulls together essays by beloved writers working to capture the essence of one of America’s greatest cities. For this anthology edited by Andrew Blauner and published to help support victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, Neil joins a roster that includes John Updike, Susan Orlean, Pagan Kennedy, Bill Littlefield, Robert Pinsky and Dennis Lehane.