Advance praise for Sultana:

“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 what the best writers do—he makes the connections. Tolbert, Maddox, and Elliott join the ranks of Odysseus and other epic journeymen struggling to survive the worst as they just try to get back home.” —Margaret McMullan, author of In My Mother’s House

“Huffman 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

“Powerful and emotionally immediate. Through Union and Confederate after action reports, diaries and first-hand recollections Alan Huffman has recovered the voices of these long dead veterans. Even if you know this story, you have never heard it like this before, and what strikes you is this: It all really happened.”  —Anne Tolbert Woodbury, great grand-daughter of Pvt. Romulus Tolbert

“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 to the Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference and numerous other Civil War publications

“The explosion and wreck of the Mississippi riverboat Sultana in 1865, which killed 1,700 passengers, mostly Union soldiers recently released from Confederate POW camps, is but the capstone of this engrossing survey of the many varieties of suffering in the Civil War. Journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa) doesn’t even get aboard the Sultana until the last third of the saga. Before that, he fills in the backstories of four Yankee survivors as they fight in the battle of Chickamauga, go raiding with Sherman's cavalry and finally get captured and sent to the infamous Southern prison camps at Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala. There they endure the torments of starvation, exposure, festering and maggoty wounds, predatory criminal gangs, lice and diarrhea — a scourge, Huffman notes, that was far deadlier to soldiers than bullets. Making skillful use of war diaries and memoirs, the author makes these quieter ordeals just as moving as the Sultana’s doomed voyage, with its “hellish scene[s] of hundreds of screaming people being burned alive” or drowning each other in panic. Huffman fits the climactic disaster into a meticulously researched, harrowing look at the sorrow and the pity that was the Civil War.” – Publisher’s Weekly

Huffman’s graphic accounts here are stories of both cowardice and selflessness, but certainly not recommended for the squeamish... His afterword is both a fascinating discussion of his historical methodology and his perspectives regarding both the triumphs and the long-term tragedy of human survival. Huffman succeeds in establishing the Sultana’s rightful place in Civil War historiography. Recommended for all Civil War and U.S. maritime collections and for all large libraries. – National Library Journal