Rating: 
Summary: Quite simply, this is an awful book
Review: Horwitz has missed a grand opportunity; instead of offering sound research on a fascinating subject, he provides readers with a large serving of overdone tripe and a side order of preconceived notions. Quite simply, this in awful book filled with the rantings of a biased, prejudiced journalist. He has an agenda: to hold our fellow Americans (southern folk) up to ridicule and scorn--and he is a master at doing this. Don't waste your time or money on this one . . . there are too many other good books out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, insightful
Review: OK, disclaimer time: I am a Yankee (from Connecticut, no less - the worst kind of Yankee), and my family has no ancestors who fought in the Civil War. But I loved Horwitz's exploration of the Civil War phenomenon that lives on in "living historians" and in all manner of remembrances throughout the South. Horwitz quotes historian Shelby Foote: "Southerners are very strange about that war"... true enough, as I read through his accounts of battle reenactments and Robert E. Lee birthday parties. Lest anyone say that the fascination with the Civil War is a Southern trait, there are a lot of Northerners who've acquired a thirst for this period in history, too (I once went to a reenactment of Chancellorsville staged in a Connecticut state park, have visited Gettysburg and the Fredericksburg/Wilderness area, and have read a ton of Bruce Catton). It's a subject that gets in your blood. So, why the obsession with this war? If Horwitz doesn't come to any universal truths, he at least shows the war as the defining moment of Southern culture. America in 1861 was still a country of regional accents and habits. The South has not lost its recollections of the past or its character, despite 137 years of change and development. For me, the interest is that the Civil War is there - in the mind and heart, almost within reach - through books, visits to battlefields and reenactments. The trappings of army life, the old daguerrotypes, the letters written by soldiers, the descriptions of combat and the personalities of each side all resonate in a way that no other period can. You don't have to be "hardcore" to wonder at the endurance of the soldiers, the code of honor of the times, and the belief that courage and elan would win the day. To paraphrase Shelby Foote, for every Southern boy today, it is always one o'clock on July 3, 1863, on the edge of a still and sunny field in Pennsylvania, just before Pickett's Charge. "Confederates in the Attic" taps into that feeling, and is both an enjoyable and insightful book.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Piece of Fiction
Review: What a disappointment this work was. I read it primarily because of the excellent prior work of the award-winning author Tony Horwitz. It turned out to be a selectively-biased work of fiction presented to an unsuspecting public as non-fiction. When his work was read on National Public Radio, there were so many complaints about the inaccuracies in it, that NPR added a disclaimer to their broadcast. Horwitz, for some undisclosed personal reason, appears to hate people from the South and attacks them with the subtlety of a World War II propagandist. Here is hoping that the very talented Mr. Horwitz will abandon such cheap shots in the future and return to the quality work for which he has been rightly honored in his more lucid past.
Rating: 
Summary: A Wealth of Material
Review: First a disclaimer: I am a travel book junkie and I like even bad travel writing. This is not bad writing. Horwitz is very talented and can take what are probably mundane interviews and turn a good tale. Horwitz crisscrosses the South after getting bit by the Civil War bug. His first encounter is with a bunch of reenactors. Horwitz spends a damp night reenacting in the frosty hills of Virginia with "hardcores" (guys who presumably do not bathe while reenacting). This reenactment consisted largely of "spoon right" and "spoon left" and "Following suit, I snuggled my neighbor." Showing some good sense Horwitz leaves the reenactors to go about their business without him and he takes up the trail of other obsessive-compulsives who day in day out re-live the Civil War. To his credit, Horwitz shows an amazing amount of empathy for these folks. He does not ridicule or belittle the people he interviews and therefore, I think he presents an unbiased portrayal of at least a portion of current southern culture and thought. Don't get me wrong, I think these folks are way out there and probably should get beyond their defensiveness over the war. You can shout "States Rights" to the hills, but the war was about slavery. The North won and we should all agree that it was good thing that slavery ended. But as Horwitz shows, there are many, many people out there who will defend the Confederacy to their dying breath and lash out about northern atrocities. The chapter on Andersonville is particularly poignant. Apparently, there is a small crowd of misfits who celebrate the "martyrdom" of the camp commander, Henry Wirz. Wirz was a war criminal. Thousands and thousands of prisoners of war died due to inhumane conditions at Wirz's camp. Yet there are some who feel compelled to celebrate his life and rationalize that, "the North did just as bad." Maybe so--but I don't know that anyone celebrates the north pow camps and makes saints out of their commanders. Someone criticized Howitz for not having a thesis and he probably doesn't, but isn't it ok to just write an interesting book showing a little bit of Americana that lives on under the radar screens of popular culture.
Rating:
Summary: Stranger than fiction
Review: Truth is stranger than fiction, and CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC certainly proves the point.
War correspondent Tony Horwitz sets out to explore the contention that some people in the South never stopped fighting The Civil War. He witnesses Klan rallies; journeys to Andersonville, the Confederate prison camp; interviews the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote; but by far the most interesting people he meets are the reenactors. Horwitz travels from Antietam to Gettysburg in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, a real "hardcore" who insists on drinking out of a tin cup, eating hard tack and salt pork, wearing homespun clothing, speaking in authentic nineteenth century diction, and maintaining a starvation diet. On the battlefied, Hodge would "do the bloat," swelling his belly, curling his hands, puffing out his cheeks, in imitation of the bloated corpses found in Matthew Brady photographs.
Horwitz visits Confederate museums, where he finds a torch used by Sherman's men, a carpetbagger's suitcase, a handwritten list of South Carolians killed in the war, a bestseller in Columbian bookstores.
Horwitz even visits a bar that celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday with a "Thank God for James Earl Ray Party." He also tells us about Michael Westerman, who drove through Guthrie, Kentucky, flying a rebel flag. Carloads of black young men ran him to ground, one of whom shot Guthrie dead.
This book is frightening, informative, and funny in spots. If you're looking for something different, CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC is a great choice.
Rating:
Summary: Humor and insight into the American South
Review: When I first picked up the book I thought it was going to be another New Yorker writing about how backward and dumb Southerners are. (I was born in NY and now live in Virginia). I was happily surprised to see that it was not. The author describes the modern south through the lens of the civil war. The characters and stories are better than any fiction. His statements on the importance of the civil may be a bit overblown, since he mainly spoke with people with a heavy interest in the war. Like most American students I fear that southern children know very little about the war. The book reads well and it very enjoyable. I would call it travel writing with an historical twist. For military history buffs it is a nice break from the usual style.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: This is the book that turned me into a Civil War buff. (Although we prefer the term "enthusiast"...) It goes deeper into the results of the CW than any other book I've read. Horwitz must either have ice water in his veins or about 3 brain cells to go where he does and ask the questions he does. Since the book is so well written, I'm going with the former.
Rating:
Summary: humorous and informative
Review: I picked up this book as a means of killing time on a cross-country flight and found that I couldn't put it down. Horwitz aims to show how memories of the Civil War still resonate with some Southerners and frequently manifest themselves in bizarre forms. Horwitz gives episodic accounts of his travels in the South, and he has a good sense of the humorous side of every incident. At the same time, he also reports on serious issues such as the rebel flag debate, and gives clear explanations of how Confederate apologists are manipulating the facts about the war to their own advantage in such situations.
Rating:
Summary: History that is still very much alive...
Review: I previously encountered journalist and former foreign correspondent Horowitz via his intermittently interesting book on travels in the Middle East, Baghdad Without A Map. Having only a passing interest in the Civil War, I hadn't really considered reading this until a friend of mine strongly recommended it in the course of talking about a mutual friend who is a Civil War reenactor. In any event, once I started reading Horowtiz's exploration of the legacy of the war in the South, I was quickly drawn in. He starts by asking himself why he, as a Jewish kid growing up in Washington, D.C., was so fascinated with the Civil War, and why he had instinctually been drawn to the Confederates as a child. This leads him to deeper questions as to what the war means-particularly to Southerners, and this means doing some extensive traveling through the South and talking to people. The book's strength is that like any good journalist, he gets around and gets people to talk to him-and not self-censor themselves. It starts with him getting to know some reenactors he meets by his house, slowly building a friendship with their leader Rob. As he soon learns, there are two kinds of reenactors, "hardcores" and "farbs." The first are so authentic that when in character, they refuse to eat anything but period food, and eschew such modern conveniences as tents and the like. They also generally prefer to avoid the battle reenactments, as there is no really authentic way to replicate the experience of being wounded and killed. One gets the sense these guys would kill their mothers for a chance to time travel back to 1861. The latter group, the so-called "farbs" are the more mainstream and harmless variety of reenactors. Horowitz's adventures with the reenactors form a kind of comic respite from the fairly serious tone of the rest of his narrative. At one point he and Rob go on a Civil War road trip of epic proportions, dubbed "The Civil Wargasm," in which they try and visit as many Civil War historical sites as possible in a 10-day mad dash. Other portions of the book are less carefree, and may prove downright shocking and disturbing to non-Southerners. In the north, the Civil War is history, whereas in the south, it's living history. Most of the war was fought in the south, and, as history bears elsewhere in the world, the losers are more apt to harbor memories than are the victors. Horowitz shows how the memories become mythology, and how this mythology is drawn upon-and often twisted-for all manner of causes. In a number of cases, his follow-up fact checking on various statements reveal a truth divergent from popularly held myth-the legend of Sherman's March being one prime example. On the whole it's a rather depressing portrait of the south, where history is used as an excuse for current problems and where both blacks and whites are both willing to openly badmouth Jews to passing reporters. It's essential reading for anyone in America or elsewhere who thinks the Civil War is a settled issue in our history.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT!
Review: This is really one of the best, most interesting, and original books out there. Horwitz does a great job of presenting the current tension in the South regarding the Civil War, Civil Rights, and the confederate flag. His writing is easily digested and often humorous while conveying important points about current events. Perhaps there is a liberal leaning in the book, however, Horwitz ably points out the errors of all that involve themselves in current Southern debates.
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