Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

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Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
New York Times • Christian Science Monitor • NPR • Seattle Times • St. Louis Dispatch

National Book Critics Circle Finalist — American Library Association Notable Book

A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history – the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle East

The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater. As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power.

Curt Prüfer was an effete academic attached to the German embassy in Cairo, whose clandestine role was to foment Islamic jihad against British rule. Aaron Aaronsohn was a renowned agronomist and committed Zionist who gained the trust of the Ottoman governor of Syria. William Yale was the fallen scion of the American aristocracy, who traveled the Ottoman Empire on behalf of Standard Oil, dissembling to the Turks in order gain valuable oil concessions. At the center of it all was Lawrence. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in the sands of Syria; by 1917 he was the most romantic figure of World War One, battling both the enemy and his own government to bring about the vision he had for the Arab people.

The intertwined paths of these four men – the schemes they put in place, the battles they fought, the betrayals they endured and committed – mirror the grandeur, intrigue and tragedy of the war in the desert. Prüfer became Germany’s grand spymaster in the Middle East. Aaronsohn constructed an elaborate Jewish spy-ring in Palestine, only to have the anti-Semitic and bureaucratically-inept British first ignore and then misuse his organization, at tragic personal cost. Yale would become the only American intelligence agent in the entire Middle East – while still secretly on the payroll of Standard Oil. And the enigmatic Lawrence rode into legend at the head of an Arab army, even as he waged secret war against his own nation’s imperial ambitions.

Based on years of intensive primary document research, LAWRENCE IN ARABIA definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

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Editorial Reviews

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If T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) is remembered at all today, it is as the subject of a 1962 Peter O'Toole film Lawrence of Arabia or, even less likely, as the author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But as veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson shows in this superbly researched book, Lawrence's adroit participation in the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) proved to infinitely more historically important than his description of it as "a sideshow of a sideshow" suggested. In fact, as Anderson demonstrates convincingly, the secret imperialist machinations to control the Middle East in effect set the board for the very real struggles of the past centuries. A major revelatory history; certain to be widely reviewed and discussed.

The New York Times Book Review - Alex von Tunzelmann

Anderson's setting of Lawrence among other foreign agents is an interesting and creative idea…the multi-character approach has the great virtue of opening up the story's complexity. Through his large cast, Anderson is able to explore the muddles of the early-20th-century Middle East from several distinct and enlightening perspectives. Furthermore, while he maintains an invigorating pace, his fabulous details are given room to illuminate.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Scott Anderson's fine, sophisticated, richly detailed Lawrence in Arabia is filled with invaluably complex and fine-tuned information…Beyond having a keen ear for memorable wording, Mr. Anderson has a gift for piecing together the conflicting interests of warring parties…Lawrence in Arabia is a fascinating book, the best work of military history in recent memory and an illuminating analysis of issues that still loom large today.

Publishers Weekly

Justifying this addition to the mountain of works on T.E. Lawrence, fabled war correspondent Anderson (The Man Who Tried to Save the World) reasons that “Lawrence was both eyewitness to and participant in some of the most pivotal events leading to the creation of the modern Middle East... a corner of the earth where even the simplest assertion is dissected and parsed and argued over.” Too many biographers of Lawrence, he suggests, have let political biases and academic hobbyhorses overshadow their work. Anderson’s own experience in some of the world’s most chaotic places allows him to speak with authority in his portrayal, at once critical and appreciative, of Lawrence and other larger-than-life individuals who left their mark on the region. A flair for the dramatic makes even the dullest historical moments redolent of palace intrigue and imperialist hubris. Readers seeking to understand why turmoil has been so omnipresent in the Middle East will benefit from Anderson’s easy prose, which makes liberal use of primary sources and research, but reads like a political thriller. The central message seems as relevant today as it was a century ago: revolutions whose success is dependent on the patronage of external powers come at a high price—a “loss of autonomy” and an influx of foreign carpetbaggers who show little concern for the inhabitants of the newly “free” land. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM. (Aug. 6)

From the Publisher

“Scott Anderson’s fine, sophisticated, richly detailed Lawrence in Arabia is filled with invaluably complex and fine-tuned information…. eminently readable…. For those already fascinated by Lawrence’s exploits and familiar with his written accounts of them, Mr. Anderson’s thoughtful, big-picture version only enriches the story it tells….. illuminating…. Beyond having a keen ear for memorable wording, Mr. Anderson has a gift for piecing together the conflicting interests of warring parties….. Lawrence in Arabia is a fascinating book, the best work of military history in recent memory and an illuminating analysis of issues that still loom large today. It’s a big book in every sense, with a huge amount of terrain to cover…. It’s high praise for both the visually grand film and this grandly ambitious book to say that they do have a lot in common.”—The New York Times

"Thrilling....a work as galvanizing and cinematic as Lean’s masterpiece....It’s a huge assignment, explaining the modern roots of the region as it emerged from the wreckage of war. But it is one that Anderson handles with panache....Anderson brilliantly evokes the upheavals and head-spinningly complex politics of an era....His story is character-driven, exhilaratingly so — Prufer, Yale, and Aaronsohn’s stories are richly sketched....shows how individuals both shape history and are, at the same time, helpless before the dictates of great power politics."
—The Boston Globe

“No four-hour movie can do real justice to the bureaucratic fumblings, the myriad spies, heroes and villains, the dense fugue of humanity at its best and worst operating in the Mideast war theater of 1914-17. Thrillingly, Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia (four stars out of four) does exactly that, weaving enormous detail into its 500-plus pages with a propulsive narrative thread”
—USA Today, 4 Stars

"Expansive, mesmerizing, and—dare one say—cinematically detailed "Lawrence in Arabia" exemplifies the ways biography and history can enhance each other."
—The Wall Street Journal

“Among the many individual stories of World War I that will doubtless be told and retold for the centenary years between 2014 and 2018, that of T.E. Lawrence stands out from all the rest…[Anderson’s] book could not be better timed. As global attention is drawn to Syria and Egypt, it is arresting to look back 100 years and see a familiar picture….The multi-character approach has the great virtue of opening up the story’s complexity. Through his large cast, Anderson is able to explore the muddles of the early 20th-century Middle East from several distinct and enlightening perspectives. Furthermore, while he maintains an invigorating pace, his fabulous details are given room to illuminate. And the book is thick with them, whether it is Lawrence attempting to collar a live leopard; Prufer arranging 10 days of “boozing, dancing and flirting” with a wayward German princess for Abbas Hilmi, the deposed khedive of Egypt; or Aaronsohn fending off a strikingly biblical plague of locusts.… [An] engrossing, thoughtful and intricate account.”
—The New York Times Book Review [Editor’s Choice]

“Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia is a gripping narrative featuring T.E. Lawrence, the adventurer, Arabist, and spy whose exploits in the First World War helped to shape the modern Middle East… A must read for anyone trying to understand the region.”
— Lionel Barber, The Financial Times

"Brilliant....a dazzling accomplishment that combines superb historical research with a compelling narrative equal to any courtroom thriller."
—The Seattle Times

“Anderson carries his erudition lightly, but there's enough scholarship there to make an academic proud. As with the best kind of yarns, you don't realize what you've learned until the narrator goes silent.”
—The Daily Beast

“A terrifically well put-together book.”
—Tom Ashbrook, On Point

"In this well-researched, sweeping account of the life and times of T.E. Lawrence, author Scott Anderson offers a fresh and compelling look at the making of the modern Middle East....a gripping narrative that makes this nearly 600-page account hard to put down....The book’s broader achievement is that it reveals the incompetence and deceit of Lawrence’s British superiors in shaping the postwar Middle East. It also offers a revealing account of other British agents and those from the United States and Germany in the remarkable events of the period."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Cuts through legend and speculation to offer perhaps the clearest account of Lawrence’s often puzzling actions and personality.....Anderson has produced a compelling account of Western hubris, derring-do, intrigue and outright fraud that hastened — and complicated — the troubled birth of the modern Middle East."
—The Washington Post

"Anderson’s well-told tale of war, betrayal and depressing short-sightedness is also a vivid reminder of why the Middle East continues to preoccupy us."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Be prepared to be surprised. Scott Anderson is a great writer and I guarantee that you’ll be startled by what he’s uncovered about T.E. Lawrence’s role in what he himself called “a sideshow of a sideshow,” otherwise known as the Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War I…..Scott Anderson’s magisterial study puts a complicated picture in context, showing how major powers’ old follies led to the wars, religious strife and brutal dictatorships that now pollute the development of the Middle East.”
—The Buffalo News

"Renders painfully clear how deeply the political structure of the Middle East has been born of eccentric fantasies."
—Esquire

“Anderson has speckled this cast with little known associates of Lawrence who are just as enigmatic as he and probably just as important in the creation of the mess we know as the modern Middle East….Exciting”
—Hudson Star Observer

"It's thorough research clothed in smoothly written prose, Anderson's history strikes a perfect balance between scope and detail about a remarkable and mysterious character."
—Booklist, starred review

"A well-fleshed portrait of T.E. Lawrence brought in burnished relief against other scoundrels in the Arabian narrative....A lively, contrasting study of hubris and humility."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Readers seeking to understand why turmoil has been so omnipresent in the Middle East will benefit from Anderson's easy prose, which makes liberal use of primary sources and research, but reads like a political thriller."
—Publishers Weekly

"Anderson's genius is to show how the actions of these four men intertwined on many levels....His research is extensive and well integrated into the story, while the prose is as addictive and sophisticated as the best John le Carré thriller."
—Shelf Talker

“Lawrence of Arabia is said to have reinvented warfare, and Scott Anderson has now reinvented Lawrence. By placing him alongside the other adventurers and spies who roamed the Arabian war theater, Anderson brilliantly illuminates how the modern Middle East came to be. The research in this book is so daringly original, and the writing so spectacular, that it feels like I'm reading about the topic for the first time. A deep and utterly captivating reading experience.”
—Sebastian Junger, New York Times bestselling author of WAR and THE PERFECT STORM

"A startlingly rich and revealing portrait of one of history’s most iconic figures. Equally satisfying is the cast of obscure German and American agents nearly as eccentric as Lawrence himself. They exercised such outsized influence on shaping the world as we know it that reading about them here is not only revelatory but practically surreal. Anderson is an exquisite writer and dogged researcher, whose accounts of century-old brutalities are made utterly convincing by the knowledge that he has personally witnessed the sort of offhanded horror he’s unearthed in archives. Lovers of big 20th-century history will be in nirvana."
—Tom Reiss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE BLACK COUNT and THE ORIENTALIST

"An amazing accomplishment. LAWRENCE IN ARABIA captures the bravado, surreality, grandeur of the Middle East in the birth throes of the 20th century. Anderson employs the highest order of dramatic narrative to create an indelible portrait of a great and enduring figure of war and politics. Along for the show is a cast of characters drawn straight from Graham Greene. This is history of the most vivid and relevant order."
—Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of HORSE SOLDIERS and IN HARM’S WAY

“LAWRENCE IN ARABIA is a work of serious research and powerful insight, but it is so rich in incredible stories and glittering details that it felt like a guilty pleasure while I was reading it. Completely absorbing, sweeping in scope and riveting from the first word, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.”
—Candice Millard, New York Times bestselling author of DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC and RIVER OF DOUBT

“Few characters in history can match T.E. Lawrence for adventure, intrigue, or sheer enigma. Scott Anderson, an indefatigable reporter well-acquainted with the Arab world, has carefully reconstructed Lawrence's shadowy realm. Anderson shows how Lawrence, along with a surprisingly small cast of lesser-known rogues and operatives, laid the groundwork, wittingly or not, for the mess that is the modern Middle East. Here is an intimate history painted on a very large canvas, with one fantastically charismatic—and fabulously flawed—man at the dusty center of the tale.”
—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of GHOST SOLDIERS and HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL

Library Journal

05/01/2014
This multilayered account of the Middle East from the beginning of the 20th century through World War I depicts the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. (LJ 6/15/13)

Kirkus Reviews

A well-fleshed portrait of T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935) brought in burnished relief against other scoundrels in the Arabian narrative. American novelist and journalist Anderson (Moonlight Hotel, 2007, etc.) is evidently taken with the story of the brash, contradictory, ultimately unknowable personality who managed to galvanize the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire "because no one was paying much attention." The "Great Loot" brought out mostly the worst in those characters, portrayed with verve by Anderson, who were attracted to the lawless gain in the exotic Middle East. These included New England aristocrat William Yale, who embarked on a top-secret prospecting mission for Standard Oil in the Holy Land, and the German spy and Turkish adviser Curt Prüfer, among others. In contrast, Lawrence was profoundly moved by the Arab plight and what was increasingly viewed as Western manipulation and duplicity, revealed in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Steeped in the tales of King Arthur's court as a child, the product of secretive parents in hiding from his father's divorce scandal, Lawrence was small, shy and exceptionally bright, with ferocious self-endurance and self-sufficiency, an ideal candidate as an Oxford student to latch on to David Hogarth's archaeological dig at Carchemish in 1911. As mapper and "Syria hand" for British intelligence in Cairo with the outbreak of war, Lawrence learned the lay of the Ottoman Empire and its diverse peoples. Once he offered himself as the man on the ground to render logistical aid to the leader of the Arab Revolt, Emir Hussein, and his sons, Lawrence was in a unique position; he added to his elusiveness by adopting Arab dress. Anderson thoroughly explores the making of the Lawrence legend, from the effortless taking of Aqaba to "the fantasy of the ‘clean war' of Arab warriors." A lively, contrasting study of hubris and humility.

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307476418
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 6/3/2014
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 624
Sales rank: 16445
Product dimensions: 6.10 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, El Salvador and many other strife-torn countries. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper's and Outside. He is the author of novels Moonlight Hotel and Triage and of non-fiction books The Man Who Tried to Save the World and The 4 O'Clock Murders, and co-author of War Zones and Inside The League with his brother Jon Lee Anderson.

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Introduction

On the morning of October 30, 1918, Colonel Thomas Edward Law- rence received a summons to Buckingham Palace. The king had requested his presence.

The collective mood in London that day was euphoric. For the past four years and three months, Great Britain and much of the rest of the world had been consumed by the bloodiest conflict in recorded history, one that had claimed the lives of some sixteen million people across three continents. Now, with a speed that scarcely could have been imagined mere weeks earlier, it was all coming to an end. On that same day, one of Great Britain’s three principal foes, the Ottoman Empire, was accept- ing peace terms, and the remaining two, Germany and Austria-Hungary, would shortly follow suit. Colonel Lawrence’s contribution to that war effort had been in its Middle Eastern theater, and he too was caught quite off guard by its rapid close. At the beginning of that month, he had still been in the field assisting in the capture of Damascus, an event that heralded the collapse of the Ottoman army. Back in England for less than a week, he was already consulting with those senior British statesmen and generals tasked with mapping out the postwar borders of the Middle East, a once-fanciful endeavor that had now become quite urgent. Lawrence was apparently under the impression that his audience with King George V that morning was to discuss those ongoing deliberations.

He was mistaken. Once at the palace, the thirty-year-old colonel was ushered into a ballroom where, flanked by a half dozen dignitaries and a coterie of costumed courtiers, the king and queen soon entered. A low cushioned stool had been placed just before the king’s raised dais, while to the monarch’s immediate right, the lord chamberlain held a velvet pillow on which an array of medals rested. After introductions were made, George V fixed his guest with a smile: “I have some presents for you.”

As a student of British history, Colonel Lawrence knew precisely what was about to occur. The pedestal was an investiture stool, upon which he was to kneel as the king performed the elaborate, centuries-old ceremony—the conferring of a sash and the medals on the pillow, the tap- ping with a sword and the intoning of an oath—that would make him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

It was a moment T. E. Lawrence had long dreamed of. As a boy, he was obsessed with medieval history and the tales of King Arthur’s court, and his greatest ambition, he once wrote, was to be knighted by the age of thirty. On that morning, his youthful aspiration was about to be fulfilled.

A couple of details added to the honor. Over the past four years, King George had given out so many commendations and medals to his nation’s soldiers that even knighthoods were now generally bestowed en masse; in the autumn of 1918, a private investiture like Lawrence’s was practically unheard of. Also unusual was the presence of Queen Mary. She normally eschewed these sorts of ceremonies, but she had been so stirred by the accounts of T. E. Lawrence’s wartime deeds as to make an exception in his case.
Except Lawrence didn’t kneel. Instead, just as the ceremony got under way, he quietly informed the king that he was refusing the honor.

There followed a moment of confusion. Over the nine-hundred-year history of the monarchy, the refusal of knighthood was such an extraor- dinary event that there was no protocol for how to handle it. Eventually, King George returned to the lord chamberlain’s pillow the medal he had been awkwardly holding, and under the baleful gaze of a furious Queen Mary, Colonel Lawrence turned and walked away.

TODAY, MORE THAN seven decades after his death, and nearly a century since the exploits that made him famous, Thomas Edward Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” as he is better known—remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Despite scores of biographies, countless scholarly studies, and at least three movies, including one considered a masterpiece, historians have never quite decided what to make of the young, bashful Oxford scholar who rode into battle at the head of an Arab army and changed history.

One reason for the contentiousness over his memory has to do with the terrain he traversed. Lawrence was both eyewitness to and partici- pant in some of the most pivotal events leading to the creation of the modern Middle East, and this is a corner of the earth where even the simplest assertion is dissected and parsed and argued over. In the unend- ing debates over the roots of that region’s myriad fault lines, Lawrence has been alternately extolled and pilloried, sanctified, demonized, even diminished to a footnote, as political goals require.

Then there was Lawrence’s own personality. A supremely private and hidden man, he seemed intent on baffling all those who would try to know him. A natural leader of men, or a charlatan? A man without fear, or both a moral and physical coward? Long before any of his biographers, it was Lawrence who first attached these contradictory characteristics—and many others—to himself. Joined to this was a mischievous streak, a story- teller’s delight in twitting those who believed in and insisted on “facts.” The episode at Buckingham Palace is a case in point. In subsequent years, Lawrence offered several accounts of what had transpired in the ballroom, each at slight variance with the others and at even greater variance to the recollections of eyewitnesses. Earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe.

Among writers on Lawrence, these contradictions have often spurred descents into minutiae, arcane squabbles between those seeking to tarnish his reputation and those seeking to defend it. Did he truly make a par- ticular desert crossing in forty-nine hours, as he claimed, or might it have taken a day longer? Did he really play such a signal role in Battle X, or does more credit belong to British officer Y or to Arab chieftain Z? Only slightly less tedious are those polemicists wishing to pigeonhole him for ideological ends. Lawrence, the great defender of the Jewish people or the raging anti-Semite? The enlightened progressive striving for Arab inde- pendence or the crypto-imperialist? Lawrence left behind such a large body of writing, and his views altered so dramatically over the course of his life, that it’s possible with careful cherry-picking to both confirm and refute most every accolade and accusation made of him.

Beyond being tiresome, the cardinal sin of these debates is that they obscure the most beguiling riddle of Lawrence’s story: How did he do it? How did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolu- tionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?
The short answer might seem somewhat anticlimactic: Lawrence was able to become “Lawrence of Arabia” because no one was paying much attention.

Amid the vast slaughter occurring across the breadth of Europe in World War I, the Middle Eastern theater of that war was of markedly secondary importance. Within that theater, the Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” In terms of lives and money and matériel expended, in terms of the thousands of hours spent in weighty consultation between gener- als and kings and prime ministers, the imperial plotters of Europe were infinitely more concerned over the future status of Belgium, for example, than with what might happen in the impoverished and distant regions of the Middle East. Consequently, in the view of British war planners, if a young army officer left largely to his own devices could sufficiently organize the fractious Arab tribes to harass their Turkish enemy, all to the good. Of course, it wouldn’t be very long before both the Arab Revolt and the Middle East became vastly more important to the rest of the world, but this was a possibility barely considered—indeed, it could hardly have been imagined—at the time.

But this isn’t the whole story either. That’s because the low regard with which British war strategists viewed events in the Middle East found reflection in the other great warring powers. As a result, these powers, too, relegated their military efforts in the region to whatever could be spared from the more important battlefields elsewhere, consigning the task of intelligence gathering and fomenting rebellion and forging alli- ances to men with résumés just as modest and unlikely as Lawrence’s.
As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history.

Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish home- land in Palestine.

If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior gener- als who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the con- ditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collab- orative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved liter- ally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.

Yet within this small galaxy of personalities there remain at least two compelling reasons why T. E. Lawrence and his story should reside firmly at its center. The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace pre- saged by the nickname given the region by covetous Allied leaders in war- time: “the Great Loot.” As one of Britain’s most important and influential agents in that arena, Lawrence was intimately connected to all, good and bad, that was to come.

Second, and as the episode at Buckingham Palace attests, this was an experience that left him utterly changed, unrecognizable in certain respects even to himself. Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.

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Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

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Available on NOOK devices and apps NOOK Devices Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK NOOK HD/HD+ Tablet NOOK NOOK Color NOOK Tablet Tablet/Phone NOOK for Windows 8 Tablet NOOK for iOS NOOK for Android NOOK Kids for iPad PC/Mac NOOK for Windows 8 NOOK for PC NOOK for Mac NOOK for Web

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It's telling that Lawrence's stomping grounds were what is now S

Scott Anderson shows off a clear, definitive voice in his new bo

Lawrence in Arabia, the Making of the Modern Middle East is an o

Very educational. I enjoyed reading Lawrence in Arabia. I found

A must for any SWA junkie

Highly recommend if you are interested in the Middle East

Lawrence in Arabia is a very well researched book. It was very e

'Lawrence in Arabia' is an intense and highly informative nonfic

I really appreciated this book.

A hero uncovered in a new generation desperately seeking heroes.

Reads like a 200 mile camel ride through the desert, with lots o

Highly recommended

Recommended in book form only...

a very slow moving book

I first heard the author in an interview on Natinal Public Radio

One of the best books to read.

Outstanding..............helps one to begin to understand the co

Intriging, informative, digital maps not clear

Definitely recommend this excellent book.

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