I got this good-condition hardcover (no dust jacket) at the gift shop of the Heritage Village Museum in Woodville TX while on a visit to my folks. I've been wanting a copy of this book for ages and was delighted to find one there!

Later: A thorough and arresting look at a huge tragedy, one that was largely overshadowed at the time by Lincoln's assassination. The steamer Sultana, heavily overloaded with thousands of passengers, most of them Union soldiers who'd been released from Confederate prison camps, exploded and burned, leaving some 1800 people dead. The book touches on the situation in the prison camps, with some hard-to-look-at photos of near-skeletal prisoners - and some portraits of officers and men in better days, an interesting touch as it gives faces to some of the survivors and victims.

I'm sending this book to BCer hyphen8 in Hawaii as part of the prize for the 2011 Chills & Spills release challenge; congratulations, and I hope you enjoy the book!

*** Released for the 2012 Wine + Food + BookCrossing challenge, for the word "sultana". ***

Thank you Gory - your generous box of books arrived today and it was full of good stuff!

I'd never heard of this tragedy before you offered me this book, but it sounds like a fascinating story. I'm happy to see that it seems to have lots of illustrations; when it comes to this sort of book I usually want as many as possible. I read Robert Vaughn's Andersonville quite a while ago, so it will be interesting to get a non-fictional look at the experiences of the prisoners.

Also, very clever of you to use sultana for the Wine + Food challenge. :)