(Harper, 784 pages, $36)
Lawrence of Arabia made a career of being “fabulously weird,” said Ben Macintyre in The New York Times. Because the 5-foot-5-inch British officer “loved to dress up,” we still think of him almost a century after his World War I heroics in the Middle East as a figure in a flowing white robe with a sword in his belt and gold bands across his forehead. But if Michael Korda’s “baggy but beguiling” new biography of T.E. Lawrence sometimes heaps too much adulation on the legendary war strategist, memoirist, and diplomat, it also distinguishes itself by helping us see that its subject’s eccentricity was the key to his lasting impact on the world. Whether Lawrence was leading Arab allies into battle against their Turkish rulers or paying to be privately whipped, he exhibited “an unshakable determination to do things his own way.”
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Evidently “even heroism has its tragic limits,” said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. Distraught over the way the Middle East was remapped by the war’s victors, Lawrence tried more than once to escape his fame by re-enlisting in the British military under assumed names. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1935. But Lawrence by then had been instrumental in creating three Arab states, and Korda provides a “rather gripping” portrait of what a postwar Middle East might have looked like had Lawrence’s vision for the region been realized. Lawrence had won Arab support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and his map would have ensured that oil wealth strengthened the most developed areas rather than the “most backward.”
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