Ira W. Gruber is celebrated for the Atlantic salmon fishing techniques he developed over a lifetime of fishing on the Miramichi in New Brunswick, Canada. Ira is known for the 38 salmon fly patterns he originated and the thousands of salmon flies he tied over his lifetime, influencing such well-known contemporaries as Joe Bates, Morris Greene, Ted Niemeyer, and Leonard Wright. Ira D. Gruber, grandson of Ira W., has authored this fishing biography. A professor or history at Rice before he retired, Ira D. Gruber did the research for the book using his grandfather's papers, annotated angling books, photographs, and notes and interviewing locals in New Brunswick and Ira W.'s native Pennsylvania. The book features stunning photographs of and the patterns for the 38 original fly creations plus an additional 92 flies from Ira W.'s personal collection.

Historians have long understood that books were important to the British army in defining the duties of its officers, regulating tactics, developing the art of war, and recording the history of campaigns and commanders. Now, in this groundbreaking analysis, Ira D. Gruber identifies which among over nine hundred books on war were considered most important by British officers and how those books might have affected the army from one era to another. By examining the preferences of some forty-two officers who served between the War of the Spanish Succession and the French Revolution, Gruber shows that by the middle of the eighteenth century British officers were discriminating in their choices of books on war and, further, that their emerging preference for Continental books affected their understanding of warfare and their conduct of operations in the American Revolution. In their increasing enthusiasm for books on war, Gruber concludes, British officers were laying the foundation for the nineteenth-century professionalization of their nation's officer corps. Gruber's analysis is enhanced with detailed and comprehensive bibliographies and tables.

By focusing on the Howe brothers, their political connections, their relationships with the British ministry, their attitude toward the Revolution, and their military activities in America, Gruber answers the frequently asked question of why the British failed to end the American Revolution in its early years. This book supersedes earlier studies because of its broader research and because it elucidates the complex personal interplay between Whitehall and its commanders.
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