Tony Horwitz's book is NOT an unfair tabloid of cross-burning redneck fools - it's a balanced and subtle document of the conflicted feeling the South lives with even today. Horwitz spends much time with truly charming Civil War recreators. Those weekend "soldiers" certainly have views on the war, but they're so obsessed with recreating every detail - fasting, applying urine as a buckle shine, sneaking into Civil War parks after dark - they'd barely find time to be racist. Just playing boy games that are 100-times cooler than any Star Wars geek. They view the War as a valiant agrarian dignified David against the mean factory-obsessed Goliath. A war less about slavery and more about principle and romance.

But many Southerners distrust, fear, or just plain hate blacks. They rarely admit it in this book, but that nasty vibe is definitely here. (Racists in general are getting adept at promoting their views with less violence and more sneaky words.) Tony Horwitz moves beyond the Boys with Toy Guns and interviews a life-sentence black delinquent who fatally shot a mean white teenager with a huge rebel flag on his pickup. (Was it a random killing or a hate crime against whites and the Rebel Flag?) Horwitz interviews leaders of the Selma Alabama '60s Civil Rights movement, recording their own ambiguities about black progress, where it happened, where it did not, and what it may mean.

Ambiguious stuff - and never boring. This book has great pacing, and like any good exploration, raises so many more questions then it answers. It's strong enough to make me want to see a Dixie War buff Sunday recreation, and great enough for me to dive into Civil War books - a history I've paid little attention to until now. Excellent history, I'm just sorry America itself has never quite escaped it.


An entertaining and educational book   February 13, 2000
 18 out of 22 found this review helpful

CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC by Tony Horwitz

Americans are fascinated by the Civil War. Not only the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh and the rest, but also the controversy over the reasons for the war. Whether the defense of the institution of slavery was the main justification for the war or whether the South fought in order to maintain their way of life is a question even today. This controversy lives on as exemplified by the current flap over whether or not the Confederate flag should continue to fly over the South Carolina State Capitol.

A select few of the modern day prejudices and obsessions are delineated in this delightful book. Horwitz has documented his own fascination and that of many others whom he met in various trips around the South.

Some are the fanatic `reenactors' of Civil War battles while others are those organizations and individuals honoring the `lost cause.'

One `hardcore reenactor' (he prefers to be called a living historian) is Robert Lee Hodge, who Horwitz followed around on some of his reenactments. This man is the epitome of an obsessed person. Whether it's demonstrating the Rebel Yell or imitating the bloating of dead soldiers, Hodge is endeavoring to reproduce exactly the surroundings and actions of the Civil War soldier. The books' author follows him into such masochistic endeavors as sleeping in a mosquito-laden swamp because that's what the Johnny Rebs sometimes had to do.

On a more serious note, the author investigates some of those organizations dedicated to preserving the old South. Examples are The Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy. These clubs also are interested in preserving the history of the Confederacy.

More disturbing is the evidence of profound racial prejudice that was found by the author.

Many other facets of todays' fascination with the War Between the States are explored in this entertaining and educational book.


Yet More Rebel-Bashing   March 14, 2001
 18 out of 36 found this review helpful

Horowitz gets two stars instead of one for one reason, the man knows how to write! Even I had difficulty putting the book down.

Insofar as its content is concerned, "one-sided" would be a good description for a start. At the end of the book, Horowitz "thanks" a number of people who helped him with "research". Among them is the infamous "Crawfish", an internet entity who is all-consumed with eradicating all things Confederate. You won't pick up on that fact unless you've been following the "Confederate Flag Flap" as long as I have.

Horowitz relates a variety of experiences in his travels through the South. In one instance, he's almost mauled when he strolls into an outlaw-biker bar, sits down and proceeds to write his memoirs!? Somehow we are left with the impression that this only happens in the South. If Mr Horowitz would come up to my neck of the woods, (New York), I could happily show him several such places here where the same thing would occur.

Most disturbing is his portrayal of the killer of Michael Westerman, a 19 year old who was killed because he was flying a Confederate flag from his truck. The nauseatingly sympathetic portrayal of Westerman's killer will be one for the history books, assuming that the history books all don't get re-written.

Save your money. Wait until Horowitz writes another book. Just make sure he categorizes it under "Fiction".


Mean-spirited,petty,vindictive.Did I mention boring wannabe?   May 27, 1998
 15 out of 26 found this review helpful

This disappointing,superficial puffpiece began as a short print article in the WSJ on a tiny group of college-age Civil War buff reenactors hurling themselves into passionately eccentric research on the minutiae of the 1860s(jeans weaving, button soldering, shoe stitching, pipes and pocketwatches)in their last undergrad days before taking up the yuppie yoke at some Big Eight accountancy. Horwitz tries and fails in turn at the voices of both Dave Barry and Bill Bryson;after which the book takes a dark, mean-spirited dive from which Horwitz never surfaces again. I met Horwitz while he was researching this effort; he was a pleasant enough tablemate, though my old-fashioned code of ethics precludes drinking with hobbyists young enough, private enough and innocent enough to embrace you as their 'friend', then making them look foolish in next week's morning edition. Horwitz's hackneyed premise of superior, condescending urbanite alarm is a weary steal from the London tabloids of the early 80s, when twentysomething reporters were daily despatched from London by their editors to the wilderness hinterlands,from which to report with smug bemusement on the laughable daily struggles for survival of the hardscrabble working class of smalltown coal miners, North Sea fishermen and rural ambulance drivers, homecare nurses and other non-U sub-humans. In Britain this spiteful, antisocial genre died almost overnight from mass backlash ;that Mr. Horwitz can cynically cash in on the same formula here in the U.S. in 1998 says worlds about his agent's, his editor's, or his own all too accurate low estimate of the American semiliterati. Horwitz has unwittingly written three books in this one thin volume, none of them well: one a simpleminded padding of a short newspaper piece on undergrad history buffs' weekends into several, hm, undemanding chapters; the second a series of shabby, elementary-school betrayals of confidence of same in which Horwitz lets his newfound college-age prey befriend him, shelter him, drink with ! him, then holds their latenight pizza-joint confidences to national ridicule in print; and lastly, and here's what takes Horwitz from the merely puerile to the really repulsive, Horwitz pretends to be not some mere humorless humorist, but an intrepid investigative undercover reporter (as Jon Lovitz on SNL would say, "Yeah, that's it") revealing somehow a Deeper Conspiracy, a simmering Rebellion, grab your gasmasks and find a fallout shelter,Mama--Tony says they's a Klansman in every bush, a Militia killer in every English major handsewing his cadet grey uniform buttonholes, a James Earl Ray in every smalltown community college amer.history prof prepping for next semester's Gettysburg project. Says they's a Dark Side to the South, and somethin's Gotta Be Done before Millions Die Anew in Fratricidal Nuclear Musket Holocausts Because We Haven't Learnt the Lessons of the Wo-ah. The last is a clumsy career move unworthy of a WSJ reporter. Maybe it's a misprint. Repeated endlessly. And he just didn't catch it. In all those galley proofs(Jon Lovitz:" Yeah, that's it. And my wife, Morgan Fairchild--yeeaahhh") What's more amazing still is, as the turn of the century pedlar in the Bowery said after the stray draft-horse crapped in his open wooden barrel of milk-by-the-quart, "What the hell cares what happent. It still SELLS!"


History is never dead, it isn't even past. --Wm.Faulkner   March 27, 1999
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

This is a book that students of the Civil War and especially history teachers should read. Tony Horwitz has done what just about every student of history would like to do: travel across the Old South, following the armies, visiting the battlefields, and even joining "re-enactors." But this is much more than a nostalgic visit. Horwitz asks questions of himself and those that were willing to talk with him and discovers many disturbing, even frightening things about our nation. History teachers will cringe, weep, laugh, (and perhaps change professions) as they read of his conversations with the myriad persona who talked with him during his sojourn. Perhaps, most disturbing is the concluding chapters where he discovers that not only has the war not solved any problems, it has left a legacy of a fractured nation based on race, section, ideology, and political lines. I recommend this book most highly. As a teacher -- who happens to be teaching the CW at present -- it is sobering and refreshing, a reminder that (as Faulkner said), the past is, indeed, never dead.