The enduring weirdness of that war.

Tony Horwitz has done something remarkable. He has written a book about the Civil War that will interest not only war enthusiasts but also people who find the subject a vexation or a bore. Speaking as one of the latter, I discovered that Horwitz made me confront my aversion in a way that was both troubling and revealing. Let me explain.

I was born in the South of two Southern parents but raised mainly on Army posts, curious nonplaces that, even when located in the South, feel more like Ohio than like Alabama or Georgia or North Carolina. Growing up on an Army post, we brats looked at the civilian world with a wary eye, particularly in the South, where we were doubly different: not just outsiders and transients but also Goddamn Yankees.

If we went off-post to school, we adjusted to Southern folkways, standing at football games for the "national anthem," as "Dixie" was called, even though we knew that our anthem was the one heard at the parade grounds on weekends. More important, in those pre-integration days, we attended lily-white classes and witnessed racial barriers that were absent, or at least being dismantled, back on the forts.

Tied to this Jim Crow order was a social reality that seemed as peculiar as any I had experienced overseas. Years later, reading Walker Percy's superb essays on race and civil rights, I had it spelled out for me: The South, at least the white South before integration, was one big kinship lodge. And it was precisely because the public realm was taken to be an extension of family that white Southerners took any effort to bring blacks into it as a direct attack on their most intimate social space.

Idimly sensed this whenever, as a boy, I visited my Southern relatives. People I barely knew talked to me--and "did for me," as they say down there--as though I were their brother or cousin. I was touched by these kindnesses, but also suspicious: Why were they doing this? What did I owe them? Beyond the suspicion lay a Puritan sense that this was all dreadfully wrong.

That is why this semi-Southerner does not like to think about the Civil War, particularly about the way Southerners fetishize the whole Lost Cause business. It takes him back to memories that lie uneasily at the base of his identity. I can't help but think that many white Americans share this queasy ambivalence.

Horwitz turns out to be an oddly perfect guide for us divided souls. A descendant of Russian Jews, born and raised in the North (to the extent that Maryland is the North), he would seem to have little reason for interest in that war. But this is America, and when Horwitz's great-grandfather, Poppa Isaac, made his way from czarist Russia to the East Side of New York, one of his first purchases was a book about the Civil War. The interest was passed on, and Horwitz's father, a physician, kept his son up late at night reading from the 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil War. By third grade, Horwitz fils was completing his own "highly derivative" history of the war and commencing a Sistine-scale project: a mural of the war, pro-Rebel in slant, that would soon cover every inch of attic wall space.

Horwitz soon put aside such childish things. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, he covered both the Gulf War and Bosnia and, returning to the States, settled with his wife in the shadow of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. There he lived in tranquil expectation of their first child until one day, a band of Civil War re-enactors stumbled into their yard in search of water.

This encounter with "hard-core" re-enactors--whose dedication to authenticity includes camping out under thin blankets and huddling spoon-style to share body heat--brought Horwitz's curiosity about Civil War mania to a head. Where did it come from? Some people who were thus obsessed were so because, as Horwitz notes, "roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in [it]." But there was a greater prod to Southern memory: defeat. Losers don't forget. Nor do their children. The only Southerners who want to blot it out are black Southerners, who wish that all the noise and symbolism would go away.

T hese are generalities, of course. The strength of Horwitz's book lies in his gift for fleshing them out through precisely rendered encounters with Southerners of all walks and all colors, united only by the common Southern compulsion to answer a question with a story. Such meetings, spontaneous and arranged, punctuate Horwitz's zigzag journey through the Old Confederacy, with stops at battlefields, museums, redneck bars, gatherings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an Afrocentric school, and the living rooms of countless affable Southerners.