I have now read four books this year and each one has been relatively heavy. I started off with Selling Water by the River thinking about the Church and Jesus and where the former gets in the way of the latter. I moved to a novel, American Gods, which dealt with belief in a wide array of ways. Third was It's God's Church, a book that dealt with the life and legacy of D.S. Warner, one of the founding voices of my particular stream of Christian belief. And then I searched for what my next book would be, I found one on my wife's bookcase that fit a certain criteria and thought that it would be a relatively fun read that I could just react to without much deep thinking. HAHA! That one didn't turn out the way I planned.
For my fourth entry [of 26] I choose to knock off #19 A book you were supposed to read in school, but didn't. Little known fact, I have always loved to read, unless I had to, and then I hated it. The truth if the matter is that y education would have been a much deeper one if I would have read all of the books that I was assigned, unfortunately that was not the case. For this particular book I reached back into undergrad, to an American History class taught by Dr. Brian Dirck. My fourth book was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.
Confederates in the Attic, is part travelogue, part history, and part sociological examination, mixed with a little humor, a little nostalgia, and a lot of racial issues.
[as always if you are merely interested in my barebones comment on the book, scroll down]
I finished the final 3 chapters late last night and waited until now to write this post, in truth I could have waited longer for what is found in this book will affect me for years to come. This year will be the 160th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and 50 years from Selma, and yet what Mr. Horwitz uncovered 17+ years ago rings as true today as it did then, whichever then you would like to point to.
As a student of history I would not argue that the Civil War was fought because of the institution of slavery anymore than I would that WWII was fought because of the treatment of Jews under the Nazis, and I write that with a large amount of sadness on both fronts. The Civil War was about a clash of economies, a clash of ideologies, a clash of temperaments and the end of slavery was at least as much about the needs of the North as it was about the morality of the issue. Abraham Lincoln himself stated that if the Union could be saved by freeing no slaves he would do that, if it meant freeing every slave, he would do that. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, which we hold in such high esteem, stated only that the slaves in the states that were in rebellion were to be free, not in the border states where slavery was still legal. It wasn't until over two years later when the 13th Amendment was ratified that slavery was finally declared illegal throughout the nation.
As a half caucasian half hispanic man I wish I could say that we have come all the way in the past 160, 50 or even 17 years, but we have not. The events of the past year alone tells us the truth on that matter. Are we better off than we were back then? That depends on how you define the term 'we' in that sentence. As Mr. Horwitz finds in his book there are still a number of Americans that would more than likely answer, no, and not all of those people would be white. We have gone from slavery to Jim Crow to legal segregation to equality to volunteered segregation, which makes me wonder if we ever actually reached equality in the first place.
[I realize that while I am a good little way into this post I have mainly not talked about the nuts and bolts of Confederates in the Attic but rather talked about my thoughts based on what I read. This leads me to believe that this is less a book review and more a review of how the book worked on me, but let me try to at least give you a little bit about the book as well.]
At base Confederates in the Attic is about Mr. Horwitz's travels in 9 Southern/Border states and how the people who live there view the Civil War. He encounters men who live to reenact the battles as realistically as possible, women who carry the memory of near forgotten ancestors, bigots, racists, heroes, and everyday people whose lives have encountered the remnants of the war. He talks with the last Confederate widow, whose husband was in reality a deserter. He interacts with a community reeling from a murder. He finds out the importance that Gone With the Wind has for the Japanese. Along the way there are many humorous moments, and moments that make your heart weep.
It has now been 24 hours since I finished the book and I am still struggling with certain aspects, which speaks to subtitle of the book, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. 160 years later we are still fighting the war to some degree, but instead of muskets and cannon we use mainly our words, until the undercurrent of anger overflows into the daylight at the next loss of life, be it black or white or brown or red or blue or... This country still has issues with race and sex and creed, we still have a long way to go. MLK Jr.'s dream is still just a dream for a lot of people, and we must continue to break down the walls that exist, especially the ones of our own design.
At base how I feel about this book:
Confederates at times made me laugh, at times made me cringe, and usually made me stop and think about what I was reading, both the good and the bad. Mr. Horwitz knows how to paint a scene and how to paint a character, which is sometimes harder to do when the characters are real living breathing people. At base this was a good read, one that I wouldn't have truly digested as the person I was when I was a college student. It widened my view of the human condition in America, with its historical viewpoint and its look at current [though it was written in 1998] views on race.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
p.s. Book 5 is almost halfway finished already, so that post should be coming in the next couple days. And yes, 5 is a lot lighter.
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