Confederates in the Attic; Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.
Confederates in the Attic is a non-fictional novel written by Tony Horwitz. The book talks about Tony Horwitz, a man from the North, who decided to take a journey down South and find out how the Civil War affected America throughout the South. He took a ten-state expedition from Gettysburg to Vicksburg, stopping at many battlefields and jotting down journal entries along the way. I found this book to be interesting and very informative. While reading this book I learned some things I never knew about the Civil War.
Firstly, while Tony was in North Carolina, he met up with some women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Tony started to strike up a conversation with a woman from that Confederacy, named Sue Curtis.
"I told her about the Journey I"d just begun, and asked why she thought Southerners still cared about the Civil War.
"War between the states," she gently corrected me. "The answer is family. We grow up knowing who's once removed and six times down. Northerners say, "Forget the war, it's over." But they don't have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We've lost so much.""(Pg 26). When I read this part of the book I was surprised by how correct the statement appeared to be. I never thought about it that way. As a Northerner, I always thought that the war should not matter any more, since it was over and one hundred and thirty years had passed. I never imagined how the South could still be going through problems resulting from the Civil War. This quote set me in a straight direction for the rest of the book to understand the South's point of view about the Civil War. If I had not read this book, I would have never known that the South recently started recovering from the Civil War only about thirty years ago.
Secondly, there was something in the book that I found very interesting.