In our pages: A new look at Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia may have been immortalized in the 1962 film directed by David Lean and starring Peter O'Toole, but a new biography is worth readers' time, our reviewer Tim Rutten says.

"Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia" looks at the life of T.E. Lawrence, the Brit who was deeply involved in Mideast politics in the early part of the 20th century.

Author Michael Korda is a longtime editor with a flair for compelling storytelling, Rutten writes.

What Korda accomplishes, beyond delivering a fascinating story well told, is to make the case for Lawrence not only as a protean figure in what we've come to call "asymmetrical warfare" -- the phrase was actually employed by British strategists of his era -- but also as a shrewd, quite humane diplomat....

Korda gives a clear, rather gripping account of Lawrence's vision of what a postwar Middle East might look like -- one with a viable Jewish homeland in Palestine, which he convinced his great ally, the Hashemite prince Feisal , to accept, and rational borders for new, independent Arab nations. The betrayal of legitimate Arab aspirations by the British and French was, Korda writes, "the primary guilt that Lawrence bore, and that explains much of his life from 1922 to his death in 1935," a period in which he worked at literature and life as a private soldier and airman under assumed names.

People interested in the complex and compelling Lawrence have plenty of additional reading options. There have been more than 50 other biographies, that big-screen epic, and Lawrence's two accounts of his war experiences: "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," first published in 1926, and an abridged version, "Revolt in the Desert," which became a bestseller.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Comments

[Matt]

Now that "Uncharted 3" is coming soon, and since it deals in-depthly with T. E. Lawrence and the desert and whatnot, hopefully there'll be a slight boom in Lawrence related things.

Which is very awesome.

[bilmac]

I had alook at this book whenI was in a bookstore. With a title like hero you should get the drift of the author may have as his intention. Lawrence was actually a conflicted chararacter. Why the writer wants to champion him? Your guess is as good as mine. I sure wouldn"t read this longwinded account as there have been previous efforts, less voluminous, more grounded in fact.

[Tom Hunter]

"Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is one of the few historical pieces that deserves to be called "masterpiece". Lawrence deserves his fame for that work alone. In it, you see how a retiring English solider, through the great fortune of his personal studies, fell into a situation that allowed him to change the world. You see it happen through the book. It's for good reason that Winston Churchill called it the greatest book about war ever written.
Lawrence's achievement in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is all the more remarkable when you learn that he lost the original manuscript of the book by leaving it on the bus seat when he went out on a public bus. He had to rewrite it from memory two more times before we end up with the book we have today.

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leningrad