#Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

[bigtickhk]

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz https://amzn.to/2Ymf7GI  

[krispyweiss]

Book Review: Tony Horwitz - “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” *

Recreating an 1850s American journey by a 19th-century New York Times correspondent writing as “Yeoman,” Tony Horwitz details how much has changed - and much more has remained the same - in “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.”

Sadly, this book turns out to be the swan song from the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of “Confederates in the Attic;” Horwitz, 60, died of a heart attack while taking a walk just after the 496-page book was published. As it goes, "Spying on the South" is an appropriate bookend to "Confederates" and a book that, if it has to be his last, is a fitting end to Horwitz's esteemed career.

Following as closely as possible in Yeoman's 170-year-old footsteps, Horwitz travels by car, barge, train and mule down the Ohio River, through what is now known as the Rust Belt, down to the Delta and across Texas into Mexico to see what remains of Yeoman's time and what has been washed away by the tides of history.

The answers are not much, and not much.

Yeoman - aka the landscape architect and Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted - decided to make his journey to the slaveholding South with the goal of finding a way for the country's marching-toward-war sides to find common ground and prevent what would become the Civil War. But he soon found some positions are not defensible and some people cannot be reasoned with. And before his trip was over, Olmsted found himself working clandestinely with progressive-minded German immigrants in Texas who sought abolition.

For his part, Horwitz, traveling in the months leading up to the presidential election that installed Donald Trump in the White House, bunks with crusty barge operators on the Ohio; drinks with Cajuns in Louisiana; and gets hammered on cider at a demolition derby in Texas, recounts stories of post-Bellum, racially charged riots in the South and the monuments that pay tribute to them. He also eats copious amounts of health-destroying food that sidelines one of his traveling companions and makes portions of "Spying on the South" read like an unintentional preview of the author's sad demise.

By the end of his journey, Horwitz - like Olmsted before him - is despairing for his country. However, he retains his hope and when he finishes his trip with a visit to Central Park, he is buoyed by his inspiration's creation and its ability to bridge the economic, social and racial divides the surrounding New York City has built up over the centuries.

"Spying on the South" is not Horwitz's best work - that honor falls squarely on "Confederates in the Attic" - but it's a perfect capper to a near-perfect, and prolific career of reportage and writing. It stands as a gift to Americans of all stripes who want to learn how we got to where we are and how we might chart a different course to attain the high ideals we've always espoused and rarely lived up to.

Grade card: Tony Horwitz - “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” - B

* Sound Bites occasionally finds himself interested in something other than music.

8/4/19

[awwkleine]

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[runnymead]

From Spying on the South

Speaking of rural Cajun Louisianan’s:

“An oil-field worker named Randy put a different spin on Cajuns’ independent spirit. ‘We help ourselves, and each other,’ he said. ‘Don’t look to no government.’ A few ‘swamp people’ still lived in houses on stilts and ‘folks take’em groceries on boats.’ Neighbors shared what they caught, he added, and as if on cue, a man appeared with a box full of fresh-killed rabbits that he passed around the bar.”

- Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, p. 164 (2019).

[renniejoy]

“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.”

[bigtickhk]

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz https://amzn.to/2Ymf7GI  

[bigtickhk]

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz https://amzn.to/2Ymf7GI  

[bigtickhk]

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz https://amzn.to/2Ymf7GI 

[runnymead]

'A man moving fast cannot enjoy scenery contemplatively,' Olmsted wrote later in life, when he feared the pace of modern travel was dulling appreciation of nature.

Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, p. 152 (2019).

[runnymead]

By the end of the twentieth century, Olmsted's vision of parks as oases for scenic contemplation, and for 'civilizing' the masses, was coming to be seen as paternalistic and unmanly. Progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt championed the 'strenuous life' and the virtues of athletic facilities that Olmsted had judged inharmonious with the 'soothing rural influences' he sought to bring to parks

Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, p. 152 (2019).