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Loading... Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil Warby Tony Horwitz
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I really enjoyed this book. Although a fair bit of it was rather frightening, particularly the divisiveness of race still prevalent in much of the southern US, there were small pieces of hope for the future of people learning to live with each other now and not living only in the past. Really interesting subject told in a very nontraditional method. Loved it. The book starts with the author's own childhood love of the civil war, which was sparked by older relatives, especially his father. Horwitz declares his love of the rebel army, a love forged by their very rebelliousness, mixed with a draw to the underdog. I followed the narrative of this interest willingly, but I noticed a decided lack of comment on the slavery aspect until much farther into the book. In fact, he doesn't seem to touch on the thorny issue of how people can continue to love the confederacy when it was defined by slavery until more than halfway through: "Rob's comments raised a question I'd been chewing on since the start of my trip. Was there such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the cause inevitably tainted by what Southerners once delicately referred to as their 'peculiar institution'?" (page 239 of 386) It does become central to the ideas he's trying to present, but I felt it should have been present from, if not the start, at least a lot sooner, especially since he had obviously been thinking about it. Regardless, this was an interesting attempt to portray the issues at the heart of a clash that's still on-going. This book does not wear well in 2020, after 22 years, unfortunately. The author's admittedly Northern liberal perspective (the title says it all: if you don't get it, Google "Toys in the attic meaning") paints white Southerners as, at best eccentric and at worst, knuckle dragging redneck racists. Horwitz mocks their concerns for the nation's future, but in 2020, the summer of Burn, Loot and Murder proves that the white Southerners were right, and Horwitz was wrong. But Horwitz is a great story teller and the battlefield visits and especially the reenactment stories are well worth the read. Horwitz passed away last year, but I imagine he would have made a public statement today against the complete insanity of demanding the removal of Confederate statues, not just from public spaces, but from the battlefields themselves.
Nostalgia tinges ''Confederates in the Attic'' but seldom. One of the ironies of this book is that Horwitz is clearly a deep-dyed peace seeker. His judiciously balanced sympathies make him uncomfortable at times, caught between two camps fighting over turf. He longs for roots in the land. What he has is roots in intellectual honesty. AwardsNotable Lists
National Bestseller For all who remain intrigued by the legacy of the Civil War -- reenactors, battlefield visitors, Confederate descendants and other Southerners, history fans, students of current racial conflicts, and more -- this ten-state adventure is part travelogue, part social commentary and always good-humored. 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. Tony Horwitz's new book,Spying on the South- An Odyssey Across the American Divide, is availablenow. No library descriptions found. |
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I found the Children of the Confederacy horrifying. But I came away with a better understanding of the place the Lost Cause has in southerners' memories. ( )