Zachary Karabell was educated at Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in 1996. He is the author of several books, including The Last Campaign, which won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award, and Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek. He lives with his wife and two children in New York, where he is an executive vice president of a leading asset management firm.