Description

Nationwide Bestseller When prize winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Center 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 the war near to home, and to their 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 end result is definitely an adventure in to the soul of the unvanquished South, where in actuality the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.In Virginia, Horwitz joins a group of 'hardcorewi 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 organization 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 types 'classrooms, courts, state bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Picaresque and touching, hilarious and haunting, it speaks to those who have ever felt attracted to the South and for the dark romance of the Civil War.