Just finished Lawrence in Arabia. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ence-in-arabia

My review:
The author has collected a lot of information (some of it new, a lot of it not well known) and it would have been a 5 star book if he had stuck to telling great stories; but he also wants to right historical wrongs and sell the book as some sort of "explanation" of how and why the modern Middle East became what it did. In this respect, he rarely rises above the "Guardian" level of fashionable BS; it would have been so much better if he had tried to just calmly tell us the stories without attempting to justify the sub-title (War, deceit, imperial folly and the making of the modern middle east) since this is actually NOT a book written at that level and shouldn't pretend to be one.
And dont expect this to be a good description of the long and confused war fought in that region from 1914 to 1918. Several major events are mentioned and some British defeats are described in greater detail, but almost always without any systematic description of the fronts, the opposing armies, or the bigger economic or military picture in the region (touched upon, but not systematically described, analyzed, etc.).
Still, worth reading if you want to know more about some very interesting characters (first and foremost Lawrence, but also Kurt Prufer, William Wales, Aaron Aaronson, etc) and their adventures in the region. But unless you are willing to blindly trust the author's ability to pick and choose what to highlight and what to ignore (and I would not), you cannot take this anecdote-heavy account as a balanced and accurate account of the forces at play, much less a good analysis of why things turned out the way they did.