From Amazon.com
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born illegitimate in 1888, "the son of unmarried parents who had vanished from one life to recreate themselves in another." (His father left four daughters, a marriage, and a hefty inheritance in Dublin to start a new life in England with the woman who'd been his children's governess.) Lawrence matured into an elusive man whose shifting personas baffled admirers and detractors alike. 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 as a complex bundle of contradictions. The story of this romantic Englishman's involvement in the Arab revolt against Turkey is, as always, a gripping physical, political, and spiritual adventure, and Asher retells it well. 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.
--Wendy Smith
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
From 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. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
