One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s.
Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….” “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered.
Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. It’s an excellent piece of journalistic feature writing. (I can’t believe it’s that old already!) I would argue, though, that Horwitz’s book is worth returning to any time you’d want. I had to revisit Horwitz’s book as part of a project I’m working on for the doctoral program I’m doing, so this wasn’t just a random read of a book almost twenty years old. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood. They take the time to do the story justice-and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do.
He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago. Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic.
0 kommentar(er)
