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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