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About the author
Alice Morrison is a published free lance writer. "River Reunion" is her first book. She lives at home with her husband and teenaged daughter and has another daughter away at college. She works full time as office manager of a Chiropractic office.
 
Book's history 
 Not your typical Civil War buff, Alice had never heard of the Sultana tragedy, but then again many Civil War buffs haven't either.
In 2003 a friend, Laurie Bries, showed Alice a first hand account describing how Laurie's great great grandfather, Winfield Scott Colvin 6th Kentucky Cav., had survived the Sultana explosion. After writing a feature article on the subject for her local newspaper, Alice continued to be perplexed as to why this historic event is not covered in traditional middle-school Civil War curriculum and frankly why she had never learned about it in school. While the Titanic tragedy is featured in movies and books aplenty, she was only able to find a handful of books covering the Sultana tragedy, and no historical-fiction featuring the story of the Sultana's tragic loss.
More lives were lost to the Sultana explosion than on the Titanic, and that is not to minimize that tragedy, but it happened right here on home soil, the Mississippi River, making the Sultana our nation's worse maritime disaster.  What makes this event even more heartbreaking was the fact that most of the victims were paroled Union soldiers who had been recently released from the southern prison camps of Cahaba and Andersonville. They were packed onto the Sultana to be returned north and mustered out now that the war had ended. These same soldiers had survived many of the bloodiest battles, had spent months and years rotting in southern prison camps but were willing to endure the overcrowded conditions of the Sultana,  fueled by the promise of reunion with loved ones soon at hand.  It is revealed in the book how the men in charge of this exchange, driven by greed, made compromises and decisions that put everyone's lives in danger.
Through "River Reunion" Alice hopes to memorialize the men, women and children who were on board the Sultana  that fateful night. She also hopes this book will find it's way into schools to be incorporated as supplemental reading in conjunction with Civil War studies.
Remember the Sultana!
Reader testimonials and newspaper reviews.
 

Kanakee Daily Journal

 

 

http://www.wiscnews.com/wde/communities/459136

 

Review below by Marshall Cook a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of many books including the "Monona Quinn Mystery" Series

 

  

Review below from The Advocate, Baton Rouge LA.

by Professor David Madden local scholar

In “River Reunion: Seven Days Aboard the Sultana” by Alice Morrison, young readers experience the explosion of the Sultana with 13-year-old Ray Shaw, a stowaway searching for his brother. As 2300 Union soldiers, recently released from prison, were boarding the Sultana at Vicksburg and as it moved up the Mississippi and as it exploded and sank at

 I met Ms. Morrison at an annual gathering of descendants of the 1700 victims and the 600 survivors and encouraged her write this book for young adults because very few adults have even heard of this major event and so have not passed it on to young folks, despite the fact that five books have been published. Alice Morrison’s hope and my own is that this neglected story will have such a profound effect upon young readers that they will tell it to their children so that at long last the forgotten soldiers who perished will live again and forever in the American consciousness.

 

David Madden is chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission for Louisiana.

 

 

 

Sultana Association  

                         

 

Sultana Reunion Information