"Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War" by Tony Horowitz is part travel book, part meditation on the power of historical memory. Centered around trips the author took around the American South to sites associated with the American Civil War, the author examines how the war continues to exert an oversized role on the American psyche, even among people whose ancestors would have never have had any role in the conflict. Horowitz was a journalist willing to become close to his subjects and one of the best parts about this book are his interactions with groups of hardcore Civil War reenactors striving to capture the authentic experience of the war in increasingly elaborate fashion. At first, I thought the book might be a little outdated (written in late 1998) but as I went on, I really felt that he capture something quite unique about American identity and the idea of remembrance that would make this book interesting for students of American history and society but also for anyone interested in the idea of history generally.