Review
This review was written by ChatGPT.
Tony Horwitz’s Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide is a blend of travel narrative, historical meditation, and contemporary political reporting. Horwitz retraces the antebellum journeys of Frederick Law Olmsted through the American South, following Olmsted’s mid-19th-century route from the border states down the rivers and into Texas and the Mexican borderlands. By pairing Olmsted’s dispatches with his own encounters, Horwitz creates a running conversation between past and present.
The book’s main device—shadowing Olmsted’s travels—is one of its great strengths. Horwitz constantly sets Olmsted’s observations about slavery, class, and regional culture alongside modern realities shaped by deindustrialization, mass incarceration, racial inequality, and intense political polarization. Coal country, Cajun Louisiana, small-town Texas, and the border region all become case studies in how old hierarchies and myths have been repackaged rather than erased.
As a narrator, Horwitz is curious, self-deprecating, and often very funny. He is willing to travel in uncomfortable and sometimes ridiculous ways, whether by coal barge or mule, which produces vivid scenes and conversations with people who rarely appear in national media. Barge workers, bar patrons, reenactors, museum guides, and border residents are treated with consistent respect, even when he is clearly disturbed by some of the views they express. His willingness to listen more than lecture helps the book avoid the tone of a scolding civics lesson.
Politically, the book is more elegy than manifesto. Horwitz is clearly troubled by the persistence of Lost Cause mythology, nostalgia for the Confederacy, and hardened partisan identities. At the same time, he emphasizes that the “South” and so-called red America are not monolithic. West Virginia coal communities, Cajun parishes, Hill Country towns, and border cities have distinct histories and cultures, and the book’s best passages highlight those differences rather than collapsing them into a single caricature.
Among the book’s strengths are:
- Its rich layering of history and reportage, using Olmsted as a lens on both slavery-era and contemporary America
- Memorable, humane portraits of people across the political spectrum, without romanticizing or sneering
- An accessible way of showing how long-standing regional narratives feed into today’s political divisions
The book does have weaknesses. It is long and can feel unwieldy, especially in the later sections in Texas, where some readers may find the travel episodes repetitive. The subtitle promises a deep exploration of the “American divide,” but the analysis often remains implicit; Horwitz raises structural issues like economic inequality and racial injustice but frequently retreats back into anecdote rather than fully developing an argument. There is also a bias toward rural areas and small towns, so large Southern cities and organized movements for change receive less attention than they deserve.
Overall, Spying on the South is an ambitious and often absorbing final work from Horwitz. It will appeal to readers who enjoy narrative nonfiction that mixes history, travel, and politics without offering simple solutions. The book does not resolve the divides it explores, but it does a thoughtful job of showing how deeply rooted they are and how they continue to shape everyday life along Olmsted’s old routes.
My Thoughts
I really enjoy Tony Horwitz’s style of reporting on history. I appreciate the way he travels through lands and meets with people of different points of view. His style makes more sense to me than do the styles of reporting that are strictly based on relaying accounts from other books, letters, and magazines.
While it would have been nice if Horwitz gave more attention to developing the arguments he hinted around on race, class, and politics, I did enjoy his different methods of travel and the people he met.
Horwitz took his trip mostly in 2016, during the campaign for president that year. Reading the book nine years after most of the events took place was sad. It’s hard to believe Trump is once again in the president. It’s even harder to believe things are worse now than they were during Trump’s first term.
Even though Spying on the South forced me to consider things I try avoiding most days, I’m glad I read the book.