... opened my eyes to so many things ... Horwitz rightly prides himself on being a curious and empathetic freestyle conversationalist ... every bit as enlightening and alive with detail, absurdity and colorful characters as Confederates in the Attic was. That said, though, at a time when the American divide seems deeper and more entrenched, both books strike me as more somber than comic.

Mr. Horwitz’s journalistic approach is to remain open to experience and allow readers to form judgments for themselves. As in his previous works, his generosity of spirit enables him to strike up conversations with a broad cross section of Americans living and working below the Mason-Dixon Line ... it is the people Mr. Horwitz encounters that make his book a compelling report on the state of our present disunion. Speaking with a seemingly endless cast of perceptive, funny and welcoming Southerners, he debunks the preconceptions of his Northern neighbors who imagine 'deep-red Texas' as little more than an 'arid, alien, and hostile' territory ... Gradually a picture emerges of a region still wrestling with the aftereffects of slavery, the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction ... The Civil War continues to be fought, in Mr. Horwitz’s telling, over the relative status of white and black people.

Like Olmsted before him, Tony captures the voices of a wide diversity of Americans most of us never meet ... it is Tony’s mule trip through the beauty and partial wildness of the Hill Country, along the Guadalupe River with a brutal and offensive mule skinner and guide named Buck, that readers will find impossible to forget ... In Horwitz’s writing, past and present collide and march together on almost every page, prying our minds open with the absurdity, hilarity and humanity we encounter ... 414 pages of sparkling prose.

Horwitz is an engaging writer and apparently an engaging guy as he banters and quizzes a range of people from the smugly secure to the desperately homeless ...Spying on the South was written before a change in the political weather last year, so it seems outdated. ... His blend of Olmstead’s 1854 views and his modern experiences produce a readable travelogue without a strong political bent.

Horwitz’s best-known book remains Confederates in the Attic...an often funny and penetrating piece of reporting about the world of Civil War reenactors...while its pages are fully alive to absurdity, they are marked by generosity too. Spying on the South has many of the same strengths, but reading it is a melancholy experience. Horwitz died in May of cardiac arrest, at sixty, just after its publication. I say 'the same strengths,' and yet that American divide feels far more consequential here than it did in Confederates ... As a traveler, Horwitz is ready to talk and listen to anyone, and to laugh with them too. Some of that’s a reporter’s skill in making himself liked, but a lot is a matter of temperament, a warm, open ability to suspend judgment and take people at their own valuation. And his method often relies on chance, the accidents of the road ... He sees himself as an 'infiltrator' in accepting the hospitality of men and women who gleefully conform to 'a garish stereotype of the rural white South,' liking them individually but repelled by what they stand for. Yet he doesn’t build on that discomfort, that paradox, and the more I read, the more questions I had ... I enjoyed every diverting page of Spying on the South, but we need something more now.

A tour is only as good as its guide, and Horwitz is a seasoned one—inquisitive, open-minded, and opting for observation over judgment ...The book will appeal to fans of travelogue, Civil War–era history, and current events by way of Southern sensibilities.

...Olmsted’s position as a well-situated Northerner occasionally blinkered his vision, and to some degree Horwitz follows suit. Olmsted complained about the tacky villages he passed on his river journeys (it’s the frontier, mate), and on a quick visit to Nashville, Horwitz, who calls Martha’s Vineyard home, laments that 'Music City felt like a themed, blocks-long mall anchored by familiar brands.' Fair enough, but he skips the city’s beautiful old neighborhoods, its extensive 3,100-acre Warner Parks system and its crown jewel, Vanderbilt University. Both men are food snobs ... Horwitz is a dedicated, imaginative reporter and a great raconteur, but this book is one man’s travelogue, not an in-depth report from, as the subtitle puts it, 'the other side of the American divide.' Read it for its humor, for Horwitz’s thorough excavation of Southern history and for the delights of Olmsted's own dispatches. For the truth of today’s South, go and see for yourself.

Not many writers mix up geniality and astuteness as enjoyably as Tony Horwitz does. He’s got a rare knack for spotting topics whose eccentricity lets him juxtapose the baleful past and the cuckoo present in arresting, provocative, hugely entertaining ways ... As hard as Horwitz works to keep the narrative lively, his ramble through Texas lacks the splendidly varied profusion of incidents of the book’s first half. If Spying on the South has a flaw, it could be that it’s simply longer than it needs to be, no matter how much you admire the author’s zeal in trying to pack everything in.

...[an] expansive and generously conceived travelogue ... throughout, Horwitz brings humor, curiosity, and care to capturing the voices of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. A huge canvas of intricate details, this thoughtful and observant work delicately navigates the long shadow of America’s history.

Horwitz seldom reaches deep; his book is casually observed and travelogue-ish...more Paul Theroux than de Tocqueville ... Not as sprightly as some of the author’s past reports from the fringes but provocative and well worth reading.

Part travelogue, part historical album, part contemporary contemplation, Spying on the South is all vintage Horwitz. Awkwardly long, magisterially researched and curiously intimate, it is rich in delicious tangents and mind-bending excursions into cul-de-sacs of Americana — from contemporarily absurd to historically heinous ... Mr. Horwitz connects the disparate dots into indelible images ... Droll and wise, this harlequin narrative celebrates the sublime and ridiculous, do-si-do-ing from hilarious to solemn and sad to cautionary.