Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal

Award-winning historian Zachary Karabell tells the epic story of the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century—the building of the Suez Canal— and shows how it changed the world.

The dream was a waterway that would unite the East and the West, and the ambitious, energetic French diplomat and entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps was the mastermind behind the project. Lesseps saw the project through fifteen years of financial challenges, technical obstacles, and political intrigues. He ...