Andrew Humphreys – författare

Most people still view the final, bloody confrontation between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee as a relentless grinding away of the Army of Northern Virginia in a continuous battle of attrition, attributing Grant's victory not to his generalship but to his overwhelming superiority in numbers. General Andrew A. Humphreys (1810-1883), chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac and later the fiery commander of the Second Corps, provides readers with a far more enlightened understanding in The Virginia Campaign, 1864 and 1865 . Humphreys was known for his high military scholarship, conspicuous courage, and remarkable coolness in combat. Joshua Chamberlain hailed him as "the accomplished, heroic soldier, the noble and modest man."In The Virginia Campaign, Humphreys examines the strategy, battles, and consequences from the detached perspective of a historian intimately acquainted with his material. Especially valuable is his clear dissection of alternative plans of campaign. For readers seeking concise accounts of, and insightful analyses into, the battles of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor, the siege of Petersburg, the capture of Richmond, and the surrender of Lee's army, this volume in the landmark Campaigns of the Civil War series more than fulfills the requirements.

A colorfully illustrated celebration of the classic era of cruising on the Nile, new in paperbackSince Antony and Cleopatra honeymooned on the Nile on a gilded barge, visitors to Egypt have taken to the river as the best way to experience the country’s wonders. Early travelers took a dahabiya, an elegant triangular-sailed houseboat, and leisurely meandered from riverside site to site, for three months or more. Then from the late nineteenth century, Thomas Cook of Leicester, England, revolutionized the journey with a fleet of specially built paddle steamers. For the next sixty years these ‘floating palaces,’ with their private cabins, and dining, smoking, and viewing salons, red-uniformed dragoman guides, and organized donkey excursions, carried the aristocratic, moneyed, and adventurous of international society of the time.Using period photography, and colorful vintage posters and advertising material, this book tells the story of the people, the places, and the boats, from pioneering Nile travelers like Amelia Edwards and Lucie Duff Gordon, through to famed later passengers, such as Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and, of course, Agatha Christie, whose staging of a death on the Nile only added to the allure.

From the earliest resthouses serving travelers on the Overland Route between Britain and Bombay to the grand Edwardian palaces on the Nile that made Egypt the exotic alternative to wintering on the Riviera, the hotels of Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan were always about far more than just bed and board. As bridgeheads for African exploration, neutral territories for conducting diplomacy, headquarters for armies, providers of home comforts for writers, painters, scholars, and archaeologists in the field, and social hubs for an international elite, more of importance happened in Egypt's hotels than in any other setting. It was through the hotels that visitors from the west-the earliest adventurers, then the travelers and, finally, the tourists-experienced the Orient. This book tells the stories of Egypt's historic hotels (including the Cecil, Shepheard's, the Mena House, Gezira Palace, Semiramis, Winter Palace, and Cataract) and some of the people who stayed in them, from Amelia Edwards, Lucie Duff Gordon and Florence Nightingale to Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, and TE Lawrence.