Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

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