June 3, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 92 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session

[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E698]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PAYING TRIBUTE TO WRITER TONY HORWITZ

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. STEVE COHEN

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, June 3, 2019

  Mr. COHEN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Pulitzer 
Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz who died last week at the age of 60. 
His 1998 Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished 
Civil War was hugely influential on me because, having grown up in the 
South, I could relate to much of what he wrote. His views on civil 
rights and even on zoning laws were insightful and illuminating. I 
recall once visiting my neighbor and friend the Civil War historian 
Shelby Foote and seeing Confederates in the Attic among his books. He 
told me Horwitz had recently visited and had dropped off a copy, and 
Foote said he wished he'd read it before the visit. Horwitz won his 
Pulitzer Prize as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for his stories 
on low-wage workers at garbage recycling and poultry processing plants 
and worked for The New Yorker before writing Confederates in the Attic. 
Known for his deep reporting and participatory journalism, Horwitz also 
wrote Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before 
(2002) in which he retraced the 18th century explorer's voyages in the 
Pacific; A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008), 
which looked at what America was like before its European discovery; 
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War 
(2011) about the abolitionist's 1859 attack on the military arsenal at 
Harper's Ferry; and Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American 
Divide that came out in May which followed the future landscape 
architect Frederick Law Olmstead's reporting for The New York Times 
from the South prior to the Civil War. Horwitz's reputation as a hands-
on reporter and writer will be long remembered. I wish to express my 
condolences to his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks; to his sons 
Nathaniel and Bizu; and to his many fans and friends.

                          ____________________