Great travel great history great

Spying on the South
An Odyssey Across the American Divide

About the only thing that would have improved this nearly perfect book would have been more direct quotes from Olmstead's writings. Possibly it would have been hard to choose quotes suitable for the modern reading audience, given the propensity for wordiness in writers of that era, but I think Mr Horwitz could have culled out a few. He did a great job relating the written observations, but sometimes there is no substitute for reading a person's words.

A great book can come about at any time, on any subject. But this one happened at just the time when I needed it--the parallels between Olmstead's era and ours are shocking--and oddly reassuring. Surely, if the nation of America could get through the chaos and divide of the civil war, they could get through today's. I hope.

...I couldn't help seeing commonalities between his troubled era and mine.
The most glaring parallel was the retreat into tribal and partisan camps, tuned to frequencies so divergent that the reasoned discourse Yeoman [Olmsted's pseudonym] had initially sought was a virtual impossibility. Also resonant was the role of what he called 'ultraists," who stoked and exploited the nation's divisions and spread conspiracy theories, especially in the South. One of many examples: fire-eaters' success in convincing a large swath of the white South that Abraham Lincoln, a peace-seeking accomodationist, was a "Black Republican" in league with radical abolitionists bent on destroying slavery.
Many Northerners were possessed by an opposing specter: the "Slave Power," viewed rather like the Koch brothers today, as a sinister cabal pulling the strings at every level of government, including the Supreme Court.
...
Americans, in short, not only despaired of their government and laws. They abandoned the fundamental compact and creed that citizens of diverse religions, backgrounds, and faiths were united by a common history and allegiance to founding principles.

Mr. Horwitz goes on to describe a few voters in the 2016 election and their reasons for voting as they did. His next few paragraphs--too long to transcribe here for you--relate the many thoughts and emotions that led to the election outcome which surprised us all. But perhaps we shouldn't have been, just as people in the 1850s shouldn't have been surprised when the South's politicians decided that reconciliation was impossible and succession the only answer.  I wonder if the nation was not truly reunited until the wars of the nineteenth century and the great depression...I hope it won't take events so painful to unite us now.

Mr. Horwitz' book gets five stars for its history, analysis, and human encounters. And the author worked hard to stay true to Olmsted's route on the journey. He wrote it well.
As a physical travelogue it's pretty good too, although you can tell he's not a natural history expert. But he's appreciative of natural scenes and describes them well, drawing lessons from them in understanding the parks and places that Olmsted's later created. I thought that last chapter--modern day reviews of some of Olmsted's creations--was cut a little short. But only a little bit, and more might have been too much. I'm satisfied.