His book “ Confederates in the Attic,” from 1998, shattered his readers’ understanding of the Civil War. Those pen-and-ink soldiers, in the pages of Horwitz’s many books, came to life in their descendants, champions of the Confederacy, modern-day Klansmen, anguished, angry, and haunted. But, most lastingly, he wrote about the Civil War and its tortured legacy of hatred and division, battles that never ended. He once retraced the ocean voyage of James Cook. The author of “ Baghdad Without a Map,” Horwitz undertook adventure. Horwitz, who died Monday, at the age of sixty, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, a former New Yorker staff writer, and a distinguished American historian with a singular voice, full of compassion and delight and wry observations and self-deprecating humor-layers that covered but never obscured his deep and abiding moral seriousness about the task of the historian as the conscience of a nation. “I was six, Poppa Isaac a hundred and one.” “Peering over his arm, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets,” Horwitz later wrote, in The New Yorker. In 1965, he showed that book to his very little great-grandson. Tony Horwitz’s great-grandfather Isaac Moses Perski came to America from tsarist Russia in 1882, a penniless teen-ager, and one of the first things he bought in his new country was a book, an illustrated history of the Civil War.
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