Updated a bit to clarify a couple of things: 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 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 don’t 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 Yale, Aaron Aaronson, etc) and their adventures in the region. But unless you are willing to blindly trust the author’s judgement in picking and choosing 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.
Some old-fashioned readers may also find his “postmodern” mean-spiritedness a bit jarring. A lot of “heroes” need to be taken down a peg, but there is an air of smug moral superiority about this author that some may find a bit off-putting.
Still, worth reading for the detailed stories alone.http://www.brownpundits.com/2014/01/...nce-in-arabia/
and my comments about Empires of the Silk Road http://www.brownpundits.com/2014/01/...the-silk-road/
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