Dolley Madison Library Reads: 'Confederates in the Attic'

Here's one more book to add to your summer reading list: Tony Horwitz's "Confederates in the Attic."

A book club discussion will start at 7 p.m. Tuesday at in McLean.

The following summary was published on Horwitz's website:

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again, this time from a war close to home and to his own heart.

... 

In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

Copies of the book are available through the Fairfax County Library System.

September's selection is "To the End of the Land" by David Grossman.