Making Sense of Yesterday

WHAT: Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz WHERE: Your Local Book Store HOW MUCH: $14.00

Did you day-dream through an entire year of 8th grade American History? Never gave a damn about the Civil War? Perhaps you’re Canadian and you never grasped what all the Blue versus Grey fuss was about? Well, even if all the above conditions apply to you, I’m still going to recommend Tony Horwitz’s Confederate in the Attic, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

Confederates is the rare book that appeals to just about anyone capable of humming the ABCs. At its core, the book revolves around Horwitz’s childhood obsession with the Civil War. Now an accomplished author, Horwitz travels from battlefield site to battlefield site in modern-day America, unearthing the forgotten civil war history of each locale and exploring the repercussions of the war in those same places today. How you view the civil war of the 19th century says a whole lot about where you stand in the America of the 21st century.

During his journey, Horwitz battles alongside hardcore civil war re-enactors, probes the minds of confederate flag proponents, chats it up with Black nationalists, and interviews just about every conceivable demographic in the South. The results vary from horrid to humorous to enlightening.

While it’d be easy to travel the south and paint simple caricatures of the locals, Horwitz does an excellent job of objective reporting. He isn’t interested in painting any faction as particularly intelligent or ignorant. The author simply opens up a dialog and lets people have their say about their world. Reading Confederates made me realize how rare this kind of reporting is in today’s world, where writers frequently seem to publish books merely as a means of furthering their own viewpoints. Horwitz, on the other hand, hews closely to the traditional tenets of journalism—it’s refreshing.

I’ve recommended this book to people from all walks of life and of every political stripe, and I’ve yet to meet someone who walked away unsatisfied. Case in point, I recently sent a copy to a friend of mine doing time in Pelican Bay (he’d voiced an interest in learning the American history he’d so assiduously ignored in school). The result? That copy of Confederates has been circulated all over the cell block and inspired a hell of a lot of good conversations between White Aryan gang members, Black Gorilla gangsters and members of the Mexican Mafia.

I don’t mean to get all weepy and “Oprah Book Club” on you, but there aren’t a whole lot of books that could appeal to that wide an audience. The power of this book lies in its ability to make sense of how yesterday’s history impacts life in America today. Pick it up. Give it a read.