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Tony Horwitz

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide Hardcover – May 14, 2019

by Tony Horwitz (Author)

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The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.

With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.

For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect.

Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Press
Publication date

May 14, 2019
ISBN-10

1101980281
ISBN-13

978-1101980286
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Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the Washington Post’s Notable Nonfiction Books of 2019
One of NPR's Best Books of 2019

“Timely . . . A valuable work that combines biography, history and travelogue. . . . Horwitz is a smooth writer and an even better reporter (hardly surprising, given that he won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting at The Wall Street Journal), and he recounts his travels with insight interspersed with humor, as well as with an intermittent raising of the eyebrows at numerous oddities and occasional evils.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In Horwitz’s writing, past and present collide and march together on almost every page, prying our minds open with the absurdity, hilarity and humanity we encounter. Olmsted spent nine months traveling 4,000 miles and then wrote hundreds of pages about it; Horwitz spent two years revisiting his paths, his ideas and his psyche, capturing the story in 414 pages of sparkling prose.” —David Blight, The Washington Post

“A compelling report on the state of our present disunion.” —Wall Street Journal

“I've been waiting for Tony Horwitz to write another big on-the-road book that crisscrosses the American cultural divide . . . Spying on the South is every bit as enlightening and alive with detail, absurdity and colorful characters as Confederates in the Attic was.” —NPR

"He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

“Horwitz’s excellence as a writer and reporter unearths forgotten chapters of history while making fascinating present-day discoveries.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Horwitz is an amiable narrator who marries a journalist’s knack for scene-setting and chatting folks up with the ability to tell a good historical tale.” —BookPage

“A tour is only as good as its guide, and Horwitz is a seasoned one—inquisitive, open-minded, and opting for observation over judgment, whether at a dive bar, monster truck rally, the Creation Museum, or a historical plantation. The book will appeal to fans of travelogue, Civil War–era history, and current events by way of Southern sensibilities.” —Booklist

“Horwitz brings humor, curiosity, and care to capturing the voices of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. A huge canvas of intricate details, this thoughtful and observant work delicately navigates the long shadow of America’s history.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“With the keen eye and deft pen that he's long brought to telling the odd and wonderful and fascinating story of America, Tony Horwitz has returned to familiar territory—the South—to give us a unique piece of reportage from a region that tells us a whole lot more about the country than the country sometimes wants to admit. Like his classic Confederates in the Attic, this book will be read, remembered, and treasured.” —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian and author of The Soul of America

“Tony Horwitz’s reporting is fearless and persistent and inspired—and it produces views of America like no one else’s. Spying on the South kept me turning the pages to see what frightening and funny revelation was coming next. An important book for our almost unprecedented moment in history.” —Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and Travels in Siberia

“In the long dark years before the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted toured the South by stage, by boat, by train, and by foot, reporting on a nation unraveling. Tony Horwitz does much more than follow in Olmsted’s footsteps in this searching travel narrative: he chronicles an American agony, the pain of division, the anguish of uncertainty. But he finds, too, an enduring American spirit of generosity, and commonweal, and curiosity.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

“Two journeys, a hundred and sixty years apart, remind us that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the midst of our country’s long-overdue reckoning with symbols of white supremacy, Tony Horwitz retraces the steps of America’s greatest landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, whose encounters with slavery forced him to rethink the role of civic spaces in the American experiment. Horwitz brings home a magnificent account of who we have been and what we might still become.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road

“Having grown up amidst the Emerald Necklace, having lived off the northern fringes of Central Park and later the western edge of its rangier cousin, Prospect, and having read Devil In the White City, I truly did not know there were any more astonishments left in the life of Frederick Law Olmsted. Leave it to the incomparable Tony Horwitz to reveal Olmsted’s secret life as a journalistic super-spy, peering not merely into the burgeoning Confederacy, but, as Horowitz poignantly observes, a cultural divide with which we are still reckoning.” —John Hodgman, author of Vacationland

“In the 1850s, Yankees saw the South as a foreign country and the New York Times sent Frederick Law Olmsted on an undercover mission to interpret it for readers. It was a daring and inspired move, and so is Tony Horwitz’s retracing of Olmsted’s path from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. Spoiler alert, things don’t always go well for our dauntless guide, but they sure do for the reader. This is one of the smartest, funniest, and most illuminating books about the South and Texas, and about our own divided times, I’ve had the pleasure to read.” —Bryan Burrough, author of Days of Rage, The Big Rich and Public Enemies

About the Author

Tony Horwitz was a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. As a newspaper reporter he spent a decade overseas, mainly covering wars and conflict in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal. Returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include the national and New York Times bestsellers, Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Voyage Long and Strange. Midnight Rising was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and one of the year's ten best books by Library Journal. Tony was also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the president of the Society of American Historians. He died in May 2019, and is survived by his wife Geraldine Brooks and their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; 1st edition (May 14, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101980281
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101980286
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #134,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15 in U.S. Abolition of Slavery History
- #25 in General Southern US Travel Guides
- #284 in Travelogues & Travel Essays

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Tony Horwitz

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Tony is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He spent a decade overseas as a foreign correspondent, mainly covering wars and conflicts for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.

His books include the national and New York Times bestsellers, Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map and A Voyage Long and Strange. Midnight Rising, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2011; one of the year’s ten best books by Library Journal; and won the 2012 William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. His latest, BOOM, is his first ebook, about a journey through the tar sands and along the route of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Tony has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

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Horwitz’s most political and pessimistic book, but still has what makes his other books special

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 22, 2019

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I love Tony Horwitz’s nonfiction. He has a simple formula: he picks some interesting, underappreciated bit of history, then explores the modern day geography. The result is a mix of travelogue and history as Horwitz interweaves his own adventures with the history. His best known work is Confederates in the Attic, and I was beyond overjoyed when I saw that he was returning to the South.

Spying on the South retraces the steps of Frederick Olmstead on a pre-Civil War trip through the South. (It wasn’t my focus or his, but Horwitz’s portrait of a young Olmstead, well before his days as a famed landscape artists, is delightful.) Horwitz alternates historical tidbits with his own misadventures. I said travelogue, but that undersells it. How many travelogues include one leg by coal barge and another by mule? The real joy of these sections are the people Horwitz meets along the way. He treats them with dignity and humanity, and their disparate stories will do far more to flesh out hillbillies and white working class Americans for the person who entry to the field was Hillbilly Elegy than a work like, say, Appalachian Reckoning.

I should make clear, though, that this is not a work that primarily focuses on hillbillies. Horwitz starts in West Virginia, but he also spends time in Kentucky, Tennessee, along the Mississippi, in Louisiana, Texas, and on the Texas-Mexico border. I was disappointed to learn that Horwitz only covers the “there” (not the “back again”) of Olmstead’s second trip. He leaves out, then, stops in Chattanooga, Asheville, and Abingdon that would have been of particular interest to me. And I loved the book, but the West Virginia chapter makes me really wish Horwitz had written a book on Appalachia and the Rust Belt instead.

Olmstead made his journeys through the South a mere decade before the Civil War. It wasn’t a pleasure trip: he sent regular dispatches back to New York for newspaper publication, and he collected and edited those dispatches into a three-volume book (since Horwitz skips the return journey with its long leg through Appalachia, I’m going to pick up the third volume, A Journey in the Back Country). Olmstead intended to foster dialogue in a country sharply divided; instead he came to see the South as intransigent and became radicalized (he would later moderate and arguably betray his principles by designed segregated spaces in the South).

As the subtitle suggests, Horwitz also takes an odyssey across the American divide. His experience writing Confederates in the Attic notwithstanding, Horwitz is open about how little he knows about the territory he covers, especially Texas. The people he meets are very much foreign to him—culturally, politically, and economically.

Spying on the South seems well-timed, and it is, but it isn’t directly a response to Trump. Horwitz sets off on his journey in West Virginia before the 2016 primaries even started. As the narrative and timeline progress, Trump begins to intrude, but Horwitz does an admirable job not using him as a crutch.

This is Horwitz’s most political and most pessimistic book, but it still has everything that makes his other books so special. The coal barge highlights “a good living for country boys” where they “can still work from the neck down.” A sojourn at a weekend devoted to mudding and Horwitz’s misadventures on a mule are enormously entertaining. Horwitz humanizes the people of the Red States he crosses throughout. Among other things, Horwitz’s narrative highlights the cultural diversity of the Red States. West Virginia is very different than Cajun Louisiana is very different than rural east Texas is very different from the Texas-Mexico border. The focus is rural, with cities like Nashville and Houston getting short shrift. The economic contrast between the rural Appalachia and South and the cities of Texas is stark.

Horwitz works hard to see the best in people, but the South has an ugly history with race, in a place where “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Horwitz goes on plantation tours that somehow manage to avoid any mention of slavery in Mississippi and is subjected to racial slurs by Texans who insist there is a camp of Muslim insurgents in their rural county (Horwitz, who worked extensively in the Middle East as a journalist, offers to go check it out). His story of a slaveholder who attempted to join in political reform after the Civil War ends in the slaughter of dozens of African-Americans.

Spying on the South may not be Horwitz’s most enjoyable book, but it is his most relevant to what I am doing here. It is the sort of book that the working class-curious neophyte ought to read, and early. Even if you aren’t so culturally conscious, you are sure to learn something from the history side.

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Franklin the Mouse

The Past Bleeding Into The Present

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2021

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‘Spying on the South’ was Mr. Horwitz’s last work before he unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of sixty in 2019. He was on a book tour for his nonfiction work that had just been released. It’s a friggin’ bloody shame for not only his family but the reading world. The author was an American journalist who won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. I anticipated ‘Spying on the South’ would be a quasi-sequel to his outstanding debut nonfiction book ‘Confederates in the Attic’ which was published in 1998. While it did not focus on the Civil War, ‘Spying on the South’ was littered with its aftereffects.

While Mr. Horwitz will make an occasional funny snarky remark, it is not at the expense of the people he interviewed. Though his stances are often polar opposites of the citizens in the book, the author does a nice job of conveying in a journalistic manner their lives, thoughts, hopes, and fears. They are shown as human beings and not one-dimensional subjects. ‘Spying on the South’ clearly shows that the South is not one monolithic entity. Mr. Horwitz also explains how the actual landscapes have dramatically changed in the last 160 years. Many of the locations have gone through their boom years and have now sunk in desperate pockets of economic depression, while other areas have seen extreme growth. There is plenty of interesting local history and lore in the book, some of it quite quirky. The author travels a few days on a coal barge; explains the Point Pleasant myth of the Mothman; visits Ken Ham’s Creation Museum; tours deplorable prison plantations; and attends the annual Louisiana Mudfest. Of course, slavery and racism play prominent roles in the book, but he also presents the various rural and urban Southern mindsets and highlights such notable people as Sam Houston, Huey Long, Cassius Clay (not the boxer), the Kickapoo tribe, and numerous powerful plantation owners who have faded into obscurity. There are also some examples of whitewashing by locals when it comes to such affairs as the Colfax massacre and Juan Crow laws. Mr. Horwitz’s time in Texas takes a sizable amount of the book and it is quite understandable. Beyond separating fact from myth about the Alamo, Texas is shown to be quite different depending upon rural or urban mindset and location in the state. The town life bordering Mexico was quite the eye-opener and shows the sheer lunacy of effectively building Trump’s wall. I frequently went online for images of individuals and locations. His few-days episode touring in Texas on a mule with an ornery guide was very amusing. ‘Spying on the South’ includes helpful maps of Olmsted’s journey but, with the exception of three photos of Fredrick Olmsted, the book has no other imagery. The book ends with Mr. Horwitz describing Olmsted’s life after his Southern journey which included the designing and construction of New York City’s Central Park.

His retracing Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1854 journey through the pre-Civil War South was an excellent idea and resulted this highly entertaining and informative work ‘Spying on the South.’ There are plenty of funny moments and charm in the thing. I am a lifelong Mainer. Mr. Horwitz’s descriptions of Southern sensibilities, especially rural ones, on many issues are as if I was transported into Bizarro World. The paperback edition includes a postscript that ends on a somewhat positive note and his ruminations are excellent.

(P.S. If Fredrick Law Olmsted was not an Aspie (high-functioning autism), then I’ll run naked through Central Park while juggling rabid porcupines.)

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Dave the Rave

Better than Confederate in the attic

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 14, 2019

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This is an easy to read, hard to put down romp through the South. With Yeoman as his guide, the author makes use of accidental characters to stitch a picture of the South, both past and present, that few readers will ever have the time or inclination uncover for themselves. His description of his interactions with mules is better than anything written by BIll Byerson. His send up of the political antics of the rhinestone mountain men who make up Trump's "base" is priceless.

Cliente Kindle

Due libri in uno

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 23, 2019

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È vero che esiste un legame tra Olmsted viaggiatore e Olmsted architetto, tuttavia le due parti del libro restano disomogenee. Malgrado ciò il libro è di grande interesse e cattura subito l'attenzione del lettore e la mantiene.

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Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide Hardcover – May 14, 2019

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