Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater. The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. It left an itch in my mind, one I left unscratched for many years until this book came along, highly recommended (and, fortunate for me as I painted a room in my home, readily available in the audio version). In my youth, the extent of my analysis was bemoaning the tragedy of Lawrence’s untimely death, and never mind the complex threads that took the young British man to the center of the strange and convoluted politics that gripped and twisted the Middle East in the early decades of the 20th century. The movie was exciting, and Lawrence was a real-world Luke Skywalker, a lone hero leading a scrappy band of rebels against the might of the Ottoman Empire, which in turn was allied with the worst villains of history, the Nazis. I first discovered him in the 1962 film “Lawrence of Arabia,” played by the already mentioned and inimitable Peter O’Toole, and I remember that I wanted to read Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (spoiler alert: I never have, though I did find a copy in a second-hand bookstore that I bought and maybe someday will even read).
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