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  • Sinking the Sultana: A Civil War Story of Imprisonment, Greed, and a Doomed Journey Home by Sally M. Walker
  • Elizabeth Bush
Walker, Sally M. Sinking the Sultana: A Civil War Story of Imprisonment, Greed, and a Doomed Journey Home. Candlewick, 2017 [208p] illus. with photographs
ISBN 978-0-7636-7755-8 $24.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-9

April 27, 1865 should have been a banner day for the two thousand or so Union parolees who had survived incarceration in hellish Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville and were now crammed aboard the sidewheeler Sultana, steaming their way up the Mississippi, ever closer to mustering out and returning home. A boiler explosion sent the vessel into rapid collapse, fire raged, and passengers (many scalded by flames and blistering steam) jumped into the chilly waters, clinging to flotsam and hoping that anyone from river or shore would rescue them. Boiler explosions were no novelty, but the horrifying death toll of over 1,000 coupled with the human drama of soldiers who had presumably endured the worst and were on the brink of well-earned deliverance make this an American tragedy to out-tragic the Titanic. Fans of Walker's Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving Mysteries of the H. L. Hunley (BCCB 6/05) already know her skill at illuminating maritime disaster from many angles; here she investigates the suspected bribery, commercial greed, military ineptitude, and myriad fatal decisions (possibly extending all the way up to President Lincoln himself) that raised the disaster from sad to epic. She also discusses why, despite the incident's having a death toll higher than that of Titanic's, few seem to know the Sultana story. Historical context is ably interwoven throughout the text, and plenty of period illustrations (responsibly captioned to [End Page 96] indicate images that are only similar to features of Sultana) bring the more arcane details of steamboat construction to light. Author and source notes, a bibliography, glossary, and index are included. This goes on every shipwreck aficionado's must-read list.

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