Education College of William & Mary | Awards Anisfield-Wolf Book Award | |
Books Eagle blue, Walking With the Wind: A, Like Judgment Day, Plundering Paradise, Oceana: Our Endanger Similar John Lewis, Bill Phillips, Ted Danson, Tom Daschle | ||
Mike D'Orso (born October 12, 1953) is an American journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia.
D'Orso authored the books Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (1996), Plundering Paradise (2002), and Eagle Blue: A Team, A Tribe and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska (2006) — and co-authored Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998), written with U.S. Congressman and former civil rights leader John Lewis, Body For Life (1999), written with fitness expert Bill Phillips, and Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them (2011), written with actor/activist Ted Danson.
Life
D'Orso's father was a U.S. Navy submarine officer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. D'Orso was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and was raised in numerous military base cities, including Key West, Florida, San Diego, California, Charleston, South Carolina, and Frankfurt, Germany. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from the College of William and Mary in 1975 and earned a master's degree in English from William and Mary in 1981.
D'Orso was staff writer for Commonwealth Magazine(1981-1984), features writer for The Virginian-Pilot (1984-1993) and contributor to Sports Illustrated magazine (1988-1993). Seven of his books have been best sellers: Rosewood: Like Judgment Day and Body For Life (both New York Times); Walking With the Wind (Los Angeles Times and Washington Post); Like No Other Time and In Praise of Public Life (Washington Post); Rise and Walk (Bookstore Journal National Christian Bestsellers); and Winning With Integrity (Business Week)}. Walking With the Wind also won the 1999 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was selected for Newsweek magazine's 2009 list of "50 Books For Our Times".
D'orso's work most often deals with issues of social justice. His first book, Somerset Homecoming (1988), written with Dorothy Redford, details Redford's extensive investigation into her ancestors' experience as slaves in North Carolina.
Like Judgment Day explores the 1923 destruction of the rural black community of Rosewood, Florida, and the survivors' and descendants' legal pursuit of monetary reparations seventy years later.
Walking With the Wind traces John Lewis's personal journey as an active leader in the civil rights movement during the 1960s.
Eagle Blue examines the plight of rural Native American villagers in arctic Alaska as they struggle to shift from a subsistence lifestyle of hunting, trapping and fishing to a modern cash economy for which they are culturally and educationally unprepared.
Plundering Paradise describes the social and environmental impact on the ecologically delicate Galapagos Islands as thousands of desperately poor Ecuadorian citizens have recently moved to the islands in search of jobs with the tourist industry there.