Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is not what you think it is. Horowitz goes South looking for examples that reinforce his biases against the South. Southerners are familiar with that smug sense of superiority. The result is unbalanced, prejudicial and, contrary to the opinion of some, poorly researched. Essentially, the book is a collection of stereotypes and cliches strung together to reinforce the political agenda of Horowitz. Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through the South in the 1850s. He wrote a book telling his experiences and opining about the South and Southerners. Horowitz took his book, his chronology and his itinerary and wrote his contemporary observations. In other words, he wrote half a book; the other half of this book is really Olmsted’s. That’s not bad work if you can get it. You get credit for a whole book by only writing half a book. Southerners are never given a chance. The author’s smugness and preconceptions are front and center from the start. The minute a waitress calls him “hon”, or someone mentions “our way of life” Horowitz can not contain himself, and becomes very condescending. Southerners are immoral, backward, undereducated and dirty, just about the lowest life form known to man. This is even before he gets to the Deep South. Horowitz admits he knows nothing of Huntington, W.Va. However, he tells his readers that the town holds the record for obesity and opioid deaths. Oh, he never visits Huntington, after gratuitously defaming it. His total “research” was probably two clicks on Google. All the towns that he visits are dying. If he finds a Southern town that is growing, he focuses on how man is making a mess of everything with urban sprawl. He has an agenda. He wants to find an example of every character that will support his list of cliches that will denigrate the South. Kentucky is attacked for Darwinism and being a Bible Belt state. He is horrified when he discovers that the Democrats of the region are turning Republican. That kills any chance for objectivity. Once in Tennessee, the title of the book should be “Slavery and Tony Horwitz’s Misconceptions.” He creates the impression that the antebellum South was awash in slaves. If he had done his research, he would have learned that only 5% of Southern households owned a single slave. Contemporary academics will often say that 25% of Southerners owned slaves. The number is the product of multiplying the 5% of the households by the average size of a Southern family, which was five. Of course, this creates a legal problem. Women generally did not own property and children to this day can not own property. There is no discussion of the concentration of slaves and the fact that 75% of them were worked in groups of 25 or more. The spatial aspects are ignored. The author wants you to believe that antebellum Northerners were totally committed to the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of slaves. William L. Garrison’s paper, “The Liberator” never had more than 2000 subscribers. I am certain millions of Northerners intended to subscribe. Horowitz comes dangerously close to the truth. He says that in 1860 Southern cotton was 60% of the Nation’s exports. There was no income tax and tariffs made up most of the national revenue. When tobacco, rice, sugar and indigo are added in, the South generated 85% of the national revenue. If you have ever wondered why the North just did not let that troublesome South go, just reread those figures. The industrious North contributed 15%. They were generous though. Before the war they spent $100,000,000 on railroads for the North and $5,000,000 for railroads in the South. On a riverboat ride, he meets a couple of liberals from California. What a love Fest! They get into a contest to see who could out liberal the other. Each evening they met to express their moral outrage over slavery and, in the process establish their superiority over every thing Southerner. Their conversations are contrived and artificial. Howitz does not take the excursions to plantations. He visits a pawn shop. If you want to get a sense of a place, pawn shops are his answer. This is much akin to me doing a travelogue of the North by visiting Detroit. The rich plantation homes of Natchez offend him. Do the mansions in the harbor towns of New England provoke the same response. They were built by mercantile families, trading slaves and supported, dare I say enriched, by the same plantation system. He happens upon a plantation bought by a liberal businessman, who has turned it into a slave holocaust museum. The author’s “research” should have revealed that 12,000,000 slaves came to N&S. America. 1,000,000 went to the South and grew to 4,000,000 by the Civil War. Only in the South did slaves reproduce themselves. 11,000,0000 slaves went to S. America to die in the silver mines. He mentions that some slaves died of yellow fever but drops it quickly. Many more whites died than slaves. That would not have been good for his narrative. When he gets to Texas, my state, I was prepared for the usual criticism being braggarts, loud, obnoxious etc. Nope, that was not political enough. Gun rights were his focus. Please note that he travelled the entire South and no one took a shot at him. Undoubtedly, he would have felt safer in Chicago where they have some real gun laws. Having heard his descriptions of racial hate, lynchings, the Klan, he comes to Houston. He admits that it is a very diverse city. I hoped for some balance in the “well researched “ book. He could have mentioned that it was the only town, north or south, with a population greater than 100,000 that integrated its entire school system without incident. Or he might have mentioned that the 8-F Group, a collection of now dead, rich white guys, TOLD, the Houston media not to cover the integration of the lunch counters.Their belief was that the citizens could work through the process if left alone. It would not have advanced his agenda. Instead he expressed his disgust at franchise stores. There are no franchises up North? Horowitz admits he puts on his roving reporter face when he is going to meet and interview someone. In every instance, no matter how vivid or colorful the character, and we have our share, he was met with every hospitality possible. He was befriended. Southerners answered his questions directly, openly and honestly. Yet, Horowitz thinks he has to adopt some two-faced facade to extract information. That approach might be needed up North. We are who we are. The sad part is that this smug elitist from Massachusetts thinks that he has outwitted we unwashed Southerners. We have seen your type before; we know what you think of us. We knew what you were going to write. The cliches are not new. Still none of the interviewees compromised themselves. They remained true to themselves and their home place.