<p> In April 1865, the steamboat <i>Sultana</i> slowly moved up the Mississippi River, its overtaxed engines straining under the weight of twenty-four hundred passengers&#151;mostly Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison camps. At 2 a.m., three of <i>Sultana</i>'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 <i>Sultana</i> is a forgotten tragedy lost in the turmoil of the times&#151;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>