Exploring the Soul of the South

I also liked Confederates in the Attic, and lived it a bit myself. My mother's family came from Natchez and were big in the cotton trade. Nanny, my grandmother, was the daughter of a prosperous Mississippi businessman, and attended a finishing school type college for ladies in Kentucky. She ran away from it her sophomore year, hooking up with an itinerant gambler who wandered the West looking for poker action. When the pokrer action wasn't good, Nanny played piano in honky tonks and whorehouses to pay the bills, since they had a daughter (my mother Betty). The whole family was full of characters, "Big Joe", the patriarch, Hon (Nanny), and Pee Wee (her diminutive second husband). My girlfriend and I took Nanny to the Stanford campus coffee house when she was well into her eighties. It had an open piano, mostly manned by self absorbed and wistful intellectuals. Nanny dressed up, played some Fats Waller (she and Fats were friends), and brought down the house. Tony likes the drunks and brawlers, but the Southerners living the high life were just as interesting. Family members fought for the Confederacy, but slavery was long gone when I was a kid, and they knew how to have a good time. As a young man I played poker professionally for 23 years. Made a living, and no regrets. Silicon Valley, even then, was a sterile nightmare. Next time, Tony, look into the tattered aristocrats of the South. They have stories that are just as interesting as the people you meet in the bars.

Muhammad Ali’s father was named after Cassius Marcellus Clay, an abolitionist. His boxer son changed his name to Muhammad Ali, who was a slave owner. Go figure.

"Early on he visited a West Virginia bar...." I hope Mr. Horwitz doesn't refer to this bar as located in "West Virginia". It was probably located in western Virginia, but certainly not in West Virginia which did not exist in the 1850s.

I’ve read several of Tony Horwitz’s entertaining, informative and often hilarious books – “Confederates in the Attic,” “Blue Latitudes,” and “Baghdad without a Map” among them. I could use a hilarious read! And I’ve read some of the works referenced in this review -- books that “explain the South” – Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and Webb’s “Born Fighting”. Both sobering. Both helped me to understand viewpoints so different from mine. Both books kind of depressing. The Civil War wasn’t really over in the home I grew up in. My father, born in Brooklyn, New York, and my mother, raised in Asheville, North Carolina, would hurl North/South invectives at each other when they strongly disagreed: “You Yank!” “Git yer cotton-pickin’ hands off that!” I’d like to think that Mr. Horwitz’ newest book will show that attitudes have changed; that a lot of progress has been made. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one

Tony's best character is Roger of Blue Latitudes...would that his good ole boys will be as good in Spy...you will never convince me that Roger is a real person... his remarks are too good.

I am a long time admirer of Tony Horwitz's books. Am looking forward to reading this one too. Thank you for the review.

Mr. Olmstead’s notes, written up by his brother when they got back to New York, became “A Journey Through Texas” published in 1857. It is a marvelous description of the life faced by my fore bearers when they arrived in Texas from Tennessee in 1836. It is a great read.

In retracing Olmsted's 1850s travels through the antebellum South, I hope that Horwitz has followed Olmsted's brilliant approach in simply letting Southerners speak for themselves. Avoiding the pitfall of most opinion/comment writings on southern life and its people, Olmsted's three published volumes is a vast treasure of direct-quote conversations with real people; slave and free, with page after page of recorded word-for-word discussions through which, even 170 years later, we can hear the voices of the South openly and fully describe their beliefs, fears, joys, and take on life. Since Olmsted chose to be a scribe rather than a spy, there is no cleaner record of the language and world below the Mason Dixon Line before the Civil War than these three volumes, and, I believe, they are essential reading as prelude to this new Odyssey not only to compare what was and what is now, but more important, to acknowledge the South as the land unto itself that it has always been, and to try to understand a people that remain profoundly mysterious to many of us of the North. Frederick Law Olmsted: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856) A Journey Through Texas (1857) A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853-4 (1860)

Read his "Confederates in the Attic". (Also a trip through the South- chasing the Civil War that, for some, has never really ended.) I hope this is just as entertaing/informative...