Sultana - by Alan Huffman (Paperback)

About the Book

Huffman pens a powerful and moving look at the sinking of the "Sultana"--the worst maritime disaster in American history.

From the Back Cover

In April 1865, the steamboat Sultana slowly moved up the Mississippi River, its overtaxed engines straining under the weight of twenty-four hundred passengers--mostly Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison camps. At 2 a.m., three of Sultana's four boilers exploded. Within twenty minutes, the boat went down in flames, and an estimated seventeen hundred lives were lost.

The worst maritime disaster in American history, the sinking of the Sultana is a forgotten tragedy lost in the turmoil of the times--the war's end, the assassination of President Lincoln, the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth. Alan Huffman presents this harrowing story in gripping and vivid detail and paints a moving portrait of four individual soldiers who survived the Civil War's final hell to make it back home.

Review Quotes

"Alan Huffman has managed to combine civil war history with the science of human survival to produce one of the most riveting war stories I have ever read. The sinking of the Sultana must outstrip, for sheer horror, any other maritime disaster suffered by this country. Huffman's smooth, intimate prose ushers you through this nightmare as if you were living it yourself. Phenomenal." - Sebastian Junger, author of THE PERFECT STORM
Exploding with Cormac McCarthy-like images of war and mass destruction, Sultana reads like a novel. Part history, part reportage, part personal essay, this is mandatory reading for anyone in the least bit curious about the Civil War, the human brain, or survival. Brilliant and funny, Huffman does was the best writers do--he makes connections. Tolbert, Maddox, and Elliott join the ranks of Odysseus and other epic journeymen strugling to survive the worst as they just try to get back home. - Margaret McMullan, author of IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE
Huffman's mesmerizing narrative of the wartime and postwar lives of three ordinary Americans--individual, 'boots on the ground' accounts of young men thrust into scenes of unspeakable hardship and violence--gives us a personalized picture of the Civil War that is often overlooked in popular military histories and campaign studies...At its heart, this is an astonishing story about cheating death. - David Woodbury, contributor, THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIVIL WAR DESK REFERENCE
"Huffman succeeds in establishing the Sultana's rightful place in Civil War historiography. Recommended." - Library Journal
Huffman rescues the Sultana tragedy from obscurity and brings the people and events surrounding it to vibrant life...[and] chronicles the explosion and its aftermath in startling detail with a wealth of striking images...A short but moving history that effectively captures both the disaster and the soldiers' ordeal. - Kirkus Reviews
"The explosion and wreck of the Mississippi riverboat Sultana in 1865 is but the capstone of this engrossing survey of the many varieties of suffering in the Civil War.... Making skillful use of war diaries and memoirs...Huffman fits the climactic disaster into a meticulously researched, harrowing look at the sorrow and the pity that was the Civil War." - Publishers Weekly