Auto Biography

May 12, 2014
In this engrossing and entertaining book, Swift (The Big Roads) tells the story of a carânot the story of a classic car model, but the story of a particular 1957 Chevy owned, in the 57 years since its manufacture, by 14 different people. While at first the conceit may seem itself too manufactured, the narrative tactfully unfolds with deeply human stories of struggle, ambition, hopes, dreams. The book's main thread follows Tommy Arney, a charming, foul-mouthed, and endlessly interesting businessman, who is tasked with restoring the Chevy to its original glory. We learn along the way the life of the vehicle and how it fit into the lives of its previous owners; we learn too of Arney's past, marked by violence and struggles of his own. Swift is a wonderful guide and the stories he relates are engaging in their own right. Welded together, though, these vignettes take on a fuller meaning, as the restoration becomes social metaphor.

Starred review from April 15, 2014
In a compassionate yet never overly nostalgic nonfiction portrait of two behemoths from another age, Virginian-Pilot reporter Swift (The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, 2011, etc.) offers a startling portrayal of a violent entrepreneurial misfit. The author, who has an obvious boyish joy for things that go fast, locks in on a guy named Tommy Arney, a local legend in rural Moyock, N.C. Along with a small crew that includes his first mate, Skinhead, his business manager, Slick, Painter Paul and other malcontents, Arney joyfully buys and sells "project cars," those fixer-uppers that dads like to work on with their kids on the weekend. But make no mistake--Arney is no curmudgeonly grease monkey with a heart of gold. He's a profane gladiator from a former age who has cursed all the curses, slept with more women than he can count, and generally drunk and brawled his way through his whole existence. One of the first things Swift relates is that Arney carries surprisingly few scars for a man who is said to have once bitten a police dog back. He's also a man at war with his times. His empire of go-go clubs and industrial real estate has fallen into ruin, and his dodgy bank loans and sprawling shop yard have the city council and the FBI lining up to nail him in court. It may sound straight out of Sons of Anarchy, and in some ways, it is. However, the heart of the story is more Bill Bryson than Hunter Thompson. Along the way, Swift lovingly recounts--despite a palpable frustration--Arney's thoughtful restoration of a classic 1957 Chevy as well as the stories of its dozen owners. Neither arc ends the way readers might expect, which comes as a pleasant surprise. A big, weird, heartfelt book about a badass who could give a damn whether you root for him or not.

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May 1, 2014
This is a fascinating dual biography of Tommy Arneydescribed as a rough customer, which is putting it mildlyand of a 1957 Chevrolet which is in Arney's possession when the book opens. In addition to owning a North Carolina strip club, Arney runs an auto-junkyard-cum-used-car-lot (neither is quite an adequate description). When not in major legal or financial difficulty, Arneyan informally educated, erratic, but remarkably well-informed individual, articulate both in profane and more standard Englishand his remarkable crew perform herculean work (meticulously described here) in restoring automobiles. The author tells Arney's story deftly and with great, often raw, humor, and it rarely loses momentum. The tale of the '57 Chevy's passage from owner to owner until purchased (and laboriously prepared to be sold) by Arney is fittingly contextualized within the central place of the automobile (in particular, this automobile, a classic) in American culture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)