CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

By Tony Horwitz. Pantheon. 399 pages. $27

What strange historical passions could induce a gainfully employed and coherentsounding young waiter to spend his weekends and much of his income pursuing a "hardcore" experience of the Civil War, a quest that involves sleeping in battlefield ditches, eating authentically wormy period grub, and studying old photos to perfect his imitation of a bloated Confederate corpse? Play-acting aside, what still-vivid historical memories provoked a black teenager to shoot and kill Michael Westerman, a white father of newborn twins in Guthrie, Kentucky, whose pickup truck displayed the Confederate flag?

The "unfinished Civil War" described by journalist Tony Horwitz runs the gamut from hobbyist fervor to deadly violence, across a vast middle stretch of more familiar manifestations of historical awareness—books, movies, tourist reconstructions, associations of Confederate veterans’ sons and daughters, debates over the teaching of history and the symbols of the Confederacy. Horwitz, a long-time Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent and author of two previous books, returned from nine years abroad to find his country plunged into the rediscovery of a war that had fascinated him as a child. Having missed such watershed events as the Ken Burns documentary, the movies Glory and Gettysburg, and the fight over whether to build a Disney theme park near Manassas battlefield in Virginia, he hit the road, seeking to find out what stokes this continuing hunger to revisit a war that ended 133 years ago.

Horwitz’s book offers a lively map of the "continuing war’s" various campaigns, but their meaning remains elusive. He finds, not surprisingly, that for many adherents the Civil War obsession spills beyond the standard motives of the amateur historian— regional pride, genealogy, escapism—into wider, still-raging issues of civil rights and race. Some of the people he talks to are clearly in full flight from modernity: the Klan members, the sweet lady in North Carolina who tells Horwitz she has enrolled her cat in the first chapter of Cats of the Confederacy. Others, it is clear, are simply engaging in their version of good clean fun by dressing as Civil War soldiers and taking part in battlefield "re-enactments."

Bouncing from the contested history of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, to the debate over whether Richmond, Virginia, will raise a statue to the black tennis player Arthur Ashe, Horwitz at times seems a bit lost in the implications of a topic that, followed to its limits, would touch most of the major preoccupations and battlefields of contemporary American culture. Mostly, though, he steers a wobbly but illuminating course between high seriousness and high camp, faithfully reflecting the peculiarly American way of constructing a shared history.

—Amy E. Schwartz