Lawrence
The Uncrowned King of Arabia
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'The best life of Lawrence yet published' - The Express
Lawrence was a brilliant propagandist, rhetorician and manipulator, who deliberately turned his life into a conundrum. But who was the real man behind the masks? Lawrence began the GreatWar as a map-clerk and ended it as one of the greatest military heroes of the 20th century. He altered the face of the Middle East, helped to lead the Arabs to freedom and formulated modern guerilla warfare. Yet he refused any honours and spent therest of his life in near obscurity. Desert explorer and Arabist, Michael Asher, set out to solve this riddle and discovers a hero whose greatness owed as much to his weaknesses as to his strengths.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As an explorer and Arabist, Asher (Two Against the Sahara) is well equipped to add an interesting psychological dimension to the figure of T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935). Asher personally retraces the footsteps of Lawrence, as recounted in his classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and in doing so takes the reader on an intimate journey into the mind and motivations of the popularly proclaimed father of "Arab independence." A bookish youth whose reading led him to view "the East as a parallel world, a dimension to which, in future, he might find the chance to escape," Lawrence fled his Victorian upbringing and an overbearing mother by joining, first, an archeological team and, later, the army intelligence service. Asher's Lawrence is a flawed man thrust by events into the forefront of history. Asher recounts Lawrence's exploits in the Arab Revolt in a fast-paced narrative style more suitable to many modern readers than Lawrence's original classic. Lawrence's subsequent disillusionment with the shortsighted view taken of the Middle East by Britain is not as important to Asher's story as the tortured paths of the explorer's soul. The book presents an excellent analysis of the personal demons that plagued Lawrence throughout his life, his revulsion over the horrors of war and the torment of reconciling his strict religious upbringing with his homosexuality. Asher points out several discrepancies in Lawrence's original narrative, noting Lawrence's self-proclaimed "aptitude for deceit," and weighing those inventions against the overall brilliance of the man and his work. Asher won't quite succeed in erasing the image of Peter O'Toole from readers' minds, but he adeptly ties the compelling figure of Lawrence to the political upheavals of the Arab world.
