Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Tony Horwitz, a prize-winning war journalist, believes he has left combat zones behind when he moves from the Middle East and Bosnian battlefields to a tranquil area in the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, Horwitz is startled awake one morning by the crackling of musket fire, and he once again begins to file front-line reports from a battle that is near and dear to his own heart.

Driven by his childhood fascination with the Civil War, Horwitz sets out to find locations and individuals who are still enthralled with America's most significant battle. As a consequence, one embarks on an odyssey into the spirit of the South that will never be defeated, where ritual and memory serve to bring the ghosts of the Lost Cause back to life.

In Virginia, Horwitz becomes involved with a group of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to mimic the appearance of starving Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan gatherings and calls for racial war, which are sparked by the death of a white man waving a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he discovers that the prison's commander, who was executed as a war criminal, is now revered as a martyr and hero; and in the novel's finale, Horwitz embarks on a lengthy journey from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox alongside Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who calls their journey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

Confederates in the Attic, written with Horwitz's trademark mix of comedy, history, and frank journalism, vividly depicts both new and ancient battlegrounds—"classrooms, courts, country bars"—where the past and present meet, sometimes in explosive ways. It appeals to everyone who has ever been lured to the dark romance of the Civil War and the mythological South. It is poignant and picaresque, mournful and amusing.