Sultana

<p>In April 1865 the steamboat <em>Sultana</em> 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 <em>Sultana</em>'s four boilers exploded. Within twenty minutes the boat went down in flames and an estimated seventeen hundred lives were lost. </p><p>The worst maritime disaster in American history the sinking of the <em>Sultana</em> 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.</p>