Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

The last book I read by Tony Horwitz- Baghdad without a Map was pretty funny and I was in need of some comedic relief so I got Confederates in the Attic. I enjoyed Tony's travels through out the South to examine why southerners today still ponder the Lost Cause. It was full of some good laughs as Tony follows a reenactor "hardcore" named Robert Lee Hodge through his civil wargasm.

" The pleasure the Civil War gave me was hard to put into words. ' You're talking about a period rush,' Rob said, when I tried to explain all of this during the final mile of our Gettysburg March...with a live chicken slung over my shoulder.. But childhood fantasy kept colliding with adult reality...and the discomforting adult questions that remembrance kept raising...For many Southerners I'd met, remembrance of the War had become a talisman against modernity, an emotional lever for their reactionary politics. The issues at stake in the Civil War -race in particular- remained raw and unresolved, as did the broad question the conflict posed: would America remain one nation? Socially and culturally,there were ample signs of separatism and disunion across class, race, ethnic and gender lines. The whole notion of a common people united by common principles -even common language- seemed more open to question than at any period in my life time." pp. 387 and 386

Tony travels through 15 states meeting Daughters of the Confederates who keep small museums full of confederate soldiers' uniforms, guns, and letters home; attending a number of tense meetings in a small town where a black young man kills a white young man for the confederate flag that drapes his truck and visiting the last surviving confederate widow who as a teenager married an 80 year old confederate who did not talk much about his service and turns out to have been a deserter. And then participating with all those hundreds of reenactors who show up at the Battle of Shilo and other battle sites on the anniversaries of the battles to engage in reenactment. Tony's greatest talent is how he describes what he encounters without judging the people he meets allowing the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.