Not a new book but one which I recently read and enjoyed is CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC: DISPATCHES FROM THE UNFINISHED CIVIL WAR by Tony Horwitz. it is a well-wriiten , engaging, and compelling book. Not a quick read for me but a thoughtful read. He explores his own fixation with the Civil War and the book is part exploration of his fascination and part historic review of the south.
Those who know me, know that I have been challenged by southerners and their life view. True there are many a great individual southerners (read Honor), and many a good attribute and lifestyle to the south ; but the under currents as explored by Horwitzz are things that challenge me. He "refers to regional memory, the importance or lack thereof yet attached to this momentous national event. As Horwitz visits the sites throughout the South, he encounters unreconstructed rebels who still hold to outdated beliefs. He also meets groups of “reenactors,” devotees who attempt to relive the experience of the soldier’s life and death. One of his most disheartening and yet unsurprising realizations is that attitudes towards the war divide along racial lines. Too many whites wrap the memory in nostalgia, refusing to look beneath the myth. Too many blacks dismiss the war as meaningless to them or to their present existence."
Some insightful quotes include:
" You Wear Your X, I'll Wear Mine" ( the one the X in the rebel flag and the other Malcolm X)
" The two men had walled themselves inside a stockade or their own creation and erected around it an ideological deadline?"
"The issues at stake in the Civil War - race in particular- remain raw and unresolved, as did the broad question the conflict posed: would America remain One Nation?"
"The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past."
