Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Vintage Departures) TONY HORWITZ
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 067975833X
Edition: Paperback; 1999-02-22
Summary:
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.
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