Alan Huffman

Frustrating. Picked up from the “disaster response” wish list, Sultana is indeed about disaster response, as the viewpoint characters author Alan Huffman writes about were wounded at Murfreesboro and Chickamauga, captured by the Confederates, subjected to Civil War medical treatment, imprisoned at Andersonville and Cahaba, paroled and loaded (to six times the boat’s rated capacity) on the steamboat Sultana, and blown up in a boiler explosion. It’s no wonder they were all a little show more jumpy for the rest of their lives.


The written narrative is excellent, with a sort of Red Badge of Courage feel, and covers the entire ordeal – the titular Sultana explosion is perhaps a quarter of the book. Huffman makes extensive use of surviving diaries, which are sometimes ineffably sad – the diarists first optimistic, then giving into increasing despair as the reality of life in Andersonville soaks in and their lives run out in a series of bouts with dysentery, fever, and just plain misery. Huffman goes into some expostulation about what it took to survive both Andersonville and the Sultana, and it turns out to confirm what a lot of other survival accounts say – don’t despair, don’t panic, carry on. Perhaps trite, but also true.


The frustrating part is the total lack of illustration. I know this is a particular hobby-horse of mine, but the narrative cries out for sketch map of Andersonville, a basic deck plan of the Sultana, a medium scale map of where the Sultana blew up, and photographs. Huffman spends several paragraphs describing photographs:


“Then in the next photo, taken after his return, the real change comes. As in every other photographic portrait of him, his hair is carefully coiffed and he is dressed to the nines. But he looks much older, more rugged and worn. His expression is defiant.”


Why not just show the pictures? Some problem with rights? I don’t know, but the lack of illustration seriously detracts from an otherwise worthwhile book. show less

Don’t let the only 3 stars fool you, this is a good book. I only give 4 stars to books that absolutely thrill me and 5 stars is for books that I can’t live without.

The weird thing is, I started this book about 5 times and kept putting it aside after the second chapter, but I couldn’t really say why, it wasn’t boring, I just wasn’t getting into it. After I promised someone I would read it, I sat down determined I would read 50 pages a day until I finished it. I read half the book show more the book that night. The next day I would have finished it, but I was falling asleep because I was tired. I finished it this morning.

After all those starts and stops, once I got into the book, I really got into it. The first few chapters talk about enlisting and how ill-prepared the men were for fighting. He also talks about the psychology of survival. Then he gets into the battles of the Civil War, none of the battle scenes are written in an ‘exciting’ fashion, he doesn’t ‘novelize’ the accounts, just reports the facts, the facts are enough. He relates how each man is captured, the conditions of the prisons and the hospitals. It is a wonder anyone who was injured in the Civil War survived, much less lived to old age.

For men who had survived battle, injury, disease and incarceration at Andersonville, “the worst confederate prison”, the explosion of the Sultana, on their way home, must have added insult to injury so to speak. Even afterwards, there was no justice either, the ones responsible, even when found guilty were not really punished. Officers were allowed to be ‘honorably discharged’.

"Ultimately the Sultana inquiries were mostly for show. Even the death toll was never fully reckoned. Officially, it was listed at just more than twelve hundred, which failed to include an entire trainload of passengers from Camp Fisk."

The accepted estimated total was 1,700 dead making it the worst known maritime disaster in America, even eclipsing the Titanic with an estimated 1,500 dead.

And the disaster of the Sultana faded into American history. When I told people I was reading a book called “Sultana” they thought I was reading about a middle eastern princess.

As I said this is a good book, I would recommend it for history lovers, Civil War aficionados, disaster freaks and the like. I use the word freak affectionately. After all I’m a freak myself. It would be interesting to people for its human nature aspects, how people survive the worst and keep going when even worse happens. show less

I rarely read non-fiction but I heard these guys on NPR and was intrigued so I bought the book. It was really interesting. Opposition research is often referenced but rarely discussed and I'd never heard it explained with such detail. I was once a speech writer. It's a special job. You either loved it or hated it. I loved it. Opposition research seems much the same way. These guys love it so you get a special window to see how it works.

Mississippi in Africa by Alan Huffman tells the tale of Huffman's attempts to track down the descendants of freed enslaved persons who were sent to the former U.S. colony of Liberia in the 1840s. Of course, he's doing this based upon poor records from Mississippi in the U.S. and during the course of Liberia's raging 14-year civil war. In the process of the story, Huffman weaves in the history of abolition and African colonization movements in the United States, the tumultuous history of show more Liberia, and the effects of the whole thing on both countries in the present. Huffman is a journalist by trade, and the text is considerably more accessible than the one other book of similar subject matter that I know of. It's worth picking up. show less