Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

"Lawrence of Arabia " began World War I as a map clerk and ended it as one of the great figures of the war. He altered the face of the Middle East, and almost single-handedly formulated many of the precepts of modern guerrilla warfare. 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. He saw himself as an intellectual rather than a soldier, and a wanderer after sensations rather than a man of action. 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. The result is a biography that captures the elusive man behind the myth.

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