Confederates in the attic: dispatches from the unfinished Civil War

Tony Horwitz

Vintage Books, 1999 - History - 406 pages

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.

In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

What people are saying

User Review -

This book is full of ignorant people who have no idea what their talking about, given there are a few here who do know their facts but there are many who are outstandingly racist. Do not read unless you want to be "sucked" into this amazing boring book that took me 12 days to read cause i could go through a single page without putting it down and screaming at it. 

Review: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

User Review  - Joe - Goodreads

Finally got around to this. A good read, highlighting the far-off nineteen....nineties. The book has aged fairly well; "political correctness" had just started really taking off in the mid- to late ...

Contents

• Section 1: 4
• Section 2: 18
• Section 3: 45

About the author

Tony Horwitz first wrote about the South and the Civil War as a third-grader in
Maryland when he pencilled a book that began: "The War was started when after all
the states had sececed (sic)." He went on to write about war full-time as a
foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, reporting on conflicts in
Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa, and Northern Ireland. After a decade abroad,
Horwitz moved to a crossroads in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where he
now works as a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Confederates in the Attic is Horwitz's third book, following the national
bestseller, Baghdad Without A Map and other Misadventures in Arabia, and One For
The Road: Hitchhiking Through the Australian Outback, to be reissued this year by
Vintage. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1995,
and the Overseas Press Club Award for best foreign news reporting in 1992, for
his coverage of the Gulf War. Before becoming a reporter, Horwitz lived and
worked in rural Kentucky and Mississippi and produced a PBS documentary about
Southern timber workers.

A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of
Journalism, Horwitz and his wife--Geraldine Brooks, also a journalist and
author--have a young son, Nathaniel. They live in Waterford, Virginia.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Confederates in the attic: dispatches from the unfinished Civil War; Vintage Departures
• Author: Tony Horwitz
• Edition: reprint, illustrated
• Publisher: Vintage Books, 1999
• ISBN: 067975833X, 9780679758334
• Length: 406 pages
• Subjects: History / General; History / Military / United States; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877); Horwitz, Tony - Journeys - Southern States; Social Science / Customs & Traditions; Travel / Essays & Travelogues; Travel / United States / South / General; United States; United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865 - Influence