A short but moving history that effectively captures both the disaster and the soldiers’ ordeal.
The little-known story of a deadly steamship explosion at the end of the Civil War.
On April 27, 1865, the Sultana was moving along the Mississippi River, writes freelance journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia, 2004, etc.). At 2 a.m., near Mound City, Ark., three of its boilers exploded and the ship sank. Some 1,700 passengers died, many of them Union soldiers recently liberated from Confederate prisons. Occurring less than three weeks after Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the disaster was lost among larger developments in American history and is known today mainly to Civil War enthusiasts. Huffman rescues the Sultana tragedy from obscurity and brings the people and events surrounding it to vibrant life. He focuses mainly on the stories of three soldiers: Romulus Tolbert and John Maddox, farmers and friends from Indiana, and J. Walter Elliott, who later wrote about his experiences. The author’s descriptions of their travails during the Civil War, especially in Confederate prisons—Elliott was incarcerated in Georgia’s infamous Andersonville—are unflinching and powerful. So is his account of the confusion and corruption that resulted from Tolbert, Maddox and Elliott crowding onto the Sultana with about 2,400 other paroled prisoners, more than six times the number the ship could safely hold. Steamboat owners, paid by the head, bribed army officials to squeeze as many soldiers as possible on each vessel; these thin, weak and sickly passengers were “in no condition for a major survival challenge.” Huffman chronicles the explosion and its aftermath in startling detail with a wealth of striking images. “After the scalded swimmers were pulled from the water,” he writes, “they were sprinkled with flour to relieve their pain.”
A short but moving history that effectively captures both the disaster and the soldiers’ ordeal.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-147054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11378-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A compendium of elegy, emotive description, and thorough research capturing past and present Jewish life in East-Central Europe. Freelance journalist Gruber (Rescue: The Exodus of Ethiopian Jews, 1987, etc.) walks us through what used to be the core of Jewish civilization in Europe. Today, fewer than 120,000 Jews live in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, a region once home to nearly 5,000,000 Jews. Between the fall of 1989 and the summer of 1993, Gruber visited the area in an attempt both to recreate the shattered past and to present a contemporary picture of the survivors' world. Her personal reflections often distract us from the subject, but her archival finds and the testimonies she has elicited from survivors and gentile neighbors offer a fascinating glimpse into largely unexplored areas of Jewish history. Gruber's cameralike eye is especially effective in surveying medieval bastions of Jewry like Prague, where she shows ornate synagogues—complete with domes, choir lofts, organs, and other objects that reflected the affluence and worldliness of Czech Jews. Unlike the poorer Jews of rural Poland and Hungary, many of these Prague Jews are shown to have abandoned basic Jewish customs and cultural knowledge. By the 20th century, their eagerness to assimilate with their non-Jewish neighbors had driven the intermarriage rate to unprecedented levels. Perhaps even more surprising is the evidence of a slow resurgence of Jewish identity in select Polish cities like Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Lodz. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, active Jewish study groups have formed, even though ``being a Jew or coming from a Jewish background can still be very uncomfortable for a Pole.'' A rich assemblage of Jewish history, but with the disconcerting organization of a patchwork quilt. (50 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-59568-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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