NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent takes us on an explosive adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South where Civil War reenactors battlefield visitors and fans of history resurrect the ghosts of the Lost Cause through ritual and remembrance. The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This splendid commemoration of the war and its legacy ... is an eyes-open humorously no-nonsense survey of complicated Americans. --The New York Times Book Review For all who remain intrigued by the legacy of the Civil War--reenactors battlefield visitors Confederate descendants and other Southerners history fans students of current racial conflicts and more--this ten-state adventure is part travelogue part social commentary and always good-humored. When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains he thinks he s put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home and to his own heart. Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America s greatest conflict. In Virginia Horwitz joins a band of hardcore reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville he finds that the prison s commander executed as a war criminal is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book s climax Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the Civil Wargasm. Written with Horwitz s signature blend of humor history and hard-nosed journalism Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and the new classrooms courts country bars where the past and the present collide often in explosive ways.