Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz

Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz

The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.
 
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.

Tony Horwitz was a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a native of Washington, D.C. He spent a decade as a newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, primarily reporting conflicts and violence for The Wall Street Journal. When he returned to the United States, he earned the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked for The New Yorker before deciding to pursue writing full-time. Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Journey Long and Weird are among his national and New York Times bestsellers. In 2011, the New York Times designated Midnight Rising a Notable Book, and Library Journal named it one of the top ten books of the year.

Tony was also the president of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. His wife Geraldine Brooks and their two kids Nathaniel and Bizu survive him. He died in May 2019.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781101980309
ISBN 10	1101980303
Title	Spying on the South
Author	Tony Horwitz
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2020-05-12
Number of pages	512
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.