Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.66 (656 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1585671428 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 419 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-09-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He saw himself as an intellectual rather than a soldier, and a wanderer after sensations rather than a man of action. Yet he refused any honors for his achievements and spent much of the rest of his life in the ranks of the army and the Royal Air Force, in near obscurity.Lawrence deliberately turned his life into a conundrum and set out to mystify those who came after him-beginning with his own account of the Arab Revolt, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in 1926-thereby assuring his place as a mythical cult-figure for posterity. The result is a biography that captures the elusive man behind the myth.. He altered the face of the Middle East, and almost single-handedly formulated many of the precepts of modern guerrilla warfare. He wore an endless series of masks.But who was the real man behind these disguises? Desert explorer and Arab scholar Michael Asher set out to solve this riddle of appearances. Retracing many of Lawrence's desert journeys, he gained startling new insights into his character. "Lawrence of Arabia " began World War I as a map clerk and ended it as one of the great figures of the war
An exceptional biography Thomas W. Jensen Michael Asher has used his personal experience as a soldier, explorer and scholar to create a biography with an immediacy and richness of visceral detail rare in previous biographies.Lawrence time as an archaeologist at Carchemish is rendered at a level of detail and with insight totally absent from most previous works. And the story that emerges, with flashes of melodrama that wouldn't be out of place in an Indiana Jones movie, is as engaging as the best fiction.Jeremy Wilson, probably . "Lawrence deserves much better" according to D. Wolf. This book fails in many ways. The reason it gets 2 stars instead of one is that it's hard to discuss Lawrence without some fascinating things coming through.First, Asher makes himelf part of the biography. He discusses his own personal travels in a manner that add absolutely nothing to the reader's understanding. The final paragraph of the book begins with "I." Further, the frequency and manner in which he interjects himself in the book is highly annoying.Second, there are numerous factu. A Crowning Glory Of A Man Much Mistaken. It was with the greatest fortune that I happened across this biography a couple of years ago,and immediately I was struck by the galloping pace and relentless ability Asher displays in making you turn each page.Two years later I find myself re-reading passage upon passage of this wonderful literary work with just as much enthusiasm as was spent the first time around. Out with the old and in with the new.This assessment of the enigmatic Lawrence steers joyfully clear of the deeply mundane
--Wendy Smith. The book's most noteworthy achievement, however, is the balanced assessment of Lawrence as "a real man with a real blend of strengths and weaknesses whose inner lack of strong identity allowed him to be anything and anyone he felt others needed him to be." Biography purists may be put off by Asher's first-person intrusions into the narrative (frequently to retrace Lawrence's most famous journeys or to consider the veracity of incidents Lawrence described in Seven Pillars of Wisdom), but they serve to anchor a near-mythic existence in the geographic realities of the region he loved. Explorer and Arabian scholar Michael Asher, himself familiar with the desert lands in which Lawrence made his military reputation during the First World War, accepts him