The short summary of this book sounds like the beginning of a bad joke:

What do you get get when you cross a Pulitzer-prize winning Jewish journalist from Connecticut with a bunch of hardcore Virginia Confederate reenactors?

You get a lot of weirdness, to start with. (Quote from the front of the book: “Southerners are very strange about that war.”–Shelby Foote) I kept shaking my head while reading this book and muttering, “He’s exaggerating. Nobody’s that obsessed.” Do you believe that there are people who spend all their weekends reenacting the battles of the Civil War? That some of the guys obsess about their weight because they want to look like starving Confederate soldiers? That there are people who commemorate the anniversary of the hanging of Henry Wirz, commander of Andersonville prison, and celebrate him as a hero of the South? That the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond is sixty-one feet high? That this quote from the book is for real?

. . . their passion for the War had crowded out everything else, including church.
“We were raised Methodists,” Sue said. “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.”
“War is hell,” Ed deadpanned. “And it just might send us there.”
But Sue didn’t worry about the afterlife. In fact she looked forward to it. “The neatest thing about living is that I can die and finally track down all those people I couldn’t find in the records.” She pointed at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Either way, it’ll be heaven just to get that information.”

I’ve lived in the South(west) all my life, and I haven’t met any of these people–although I do believe that the Civil War is still being fought, still at issue in many people’s minds and hearts. I have heard relatives correct others when someone called the War “the Civil War.” It’s the “War Between the States” or, more radically, “The War of Northern Aggression.” I have heard people talk about “those Yankees,” in fun, I hope. So I can believe that Tony Horowitz, in his tour through the Civl War states and battle sites found a subculture that is admirable (loyal and hospitable) in some ways and xenophobic (fearful and obsessive) in others. Horowitz himself is somewhat obsessed. He drew a huge mural of Pickett’s Charge on the wall of his attic as a child and spent hours poring through an old Civil War book with his father. The book is partly an attempt to understand his own affinity for all things Civil War, especially the Confederacy.

Another theme is the disappearance of many historic Civil War sites, overtaken by highways, office parks, and suburbs. Horowitz mourns the loss of these sites as he acknowledges its inevitability. He also gives readers a nostalgic picture of his visits to Antietam and Shiloh, battle fields that have been preserved and are cared for by the National Park Service.

Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who is quoted extensively in this book, says that the Civil War defined us. After reading Confederates in the Attic and thinking about its implications, I would say that War is still defining us. Will it ever be over?