No law, no government, no corporation is going to make you do the right thing. That comes from inside. Horwitz's determination to round up an exhaustive account of Southerners' opinions and ideas about the Civil War leaves many issues almost as muddled as they are when he takes them up. The symbolism of the rebel flag, the Ku Klux Klan's right to free speech, and the idea of a single, shared history between North and South, or black and white, are issues that bear no easy resolution. We have to show a little pluck, Horwitz is telling us, if we hope to understand our country.
Some people have a hard time asking random strangers embarrassingly personal questions.
Easy-going and genuinely gregarious, Horwitz claims to have learned some of his most valuable lessons about reporting while working as a union organizer in Mississippi after graduation. You get to the point where you have no shame. Being a reporter, Horwitz adds, is sometimes easier than being a writer. When his first draft ran more than 700 pages, he knew he had to do some cutting. The hardest and most important thing to learn as a writer is how to chuck your own material.