A review by susannah1215
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

5.0

I started this book in the aftermath of the events in Charlottesville (recommended to me by my dad, who stumbled across the audio book and found it engaging on multiple levels). Having grown up in a "border state,"I found the narratives I heard about the Confederacy to be complicated and nearly always infused with an undercurrent of angry pride and somewhat obsessive opinions. It is hard to thoughtfully examine angry pride or obsessions, and yet, that's exactly what Tony Horowitz does. I really valued his determination to ride through the South without a lot of personal commentary (that's not to say there's no personal reflection) but just illuminating the way people in southern states viewed the world and their memory of the world. I ended up using a chapter ("Dying for Dixie") in one of my English classes as a way of examining how stories and realities can be shaped regardless of the facts or the truth of a situation.

America, collectively, has done a terrible job reconciling slavery and the Civil War, though I think efforts like Horowitz's are an important step in that direction. He compels us to just listen and then think. I am thankful for his efforts.