Tony Horwitz could switch times slicker than a country singer handing off the melody to the girl on the dulcimer. Whether channeling Capt. Cook in the South Seas or bedding down on frozen ground with a company of Confederate re-enactors, his sublime narratives about old times illuminated our own. Part of his genius and appeal — a binocular focus revealing the present through the lens of the past and vice versa.
His latest and last shadows the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted through antebellum Dixie: “Olmsted [travels] across the nation's enduring fault line — between free and slave states in his time, and red and blue states in mine.” After “Confederates in the Attic” and “Blue Latitudes” and a more conventional portrait of John Brown in “Midnight Rising,” Mr. Horwitz again hopscotches through time with America's pre-eminent landscaper, the celebrated designer of Central Park, U.S. Capitol grounds, college campuses and urban idylls from Brooklyn to New Orleans.
Read Full Article »