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Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
: This book is facinating, intruging, but to the average boring without words. I find it as my favorite book, not so much for the war content, but for the experiance the author pulls you into. He paints a wounderful masterpeice of the dersert cultures, landscape, and his own hardships. I would greatly recomend this book.
As memoirs go, this book is brilliant. Lawrence writes in a colorful prose style, and captures your attention with lucid and well organized description and analyses. No writer has ever captured the heart of Arabia as Lawrence has in this book.
One cannot confine such a mans brillance into such words as these. 7 Pillars is a must read for any who questions their own humanity. It is a wonder of discription and varying emotions, never letting go. You are not just reading about Lawrence in this text you are pulled in and become him. Through his eyes and mind you are involved totally in one of the greatest events in western civilization. Which all being extreemly accurate and living. Read this book!!!!!!!
A junior officer in the intelligence offices in Cairo during the start of World War I, Lawrence rose to military fame as he applied his knowledge gained as a scholar to a burning drive to unit the Arabs in support of the British cause. Despite our image brought about by Peter O'Tool in the movie, Lawrence was a small man - five foot three in height - but with a physical presense of a giant.
As a source, Lawrence's descriptions of the terrain and climate are amazingly accurate, the result of many years of study and personal contact. His descriptions of the people and culture of the Arabs and their neighbors, the Turks and Egyptians, are real, even to this day and circumstance.ý
His account was disturbing to many - so much detail over too many years instilled a seed of doubt about the authenticity of the information - others wondered if Lawrence had simply aggrandized himself. His book raised questions of ethics and morality, both personal and in the course of international diplomacy immediately after it's release, to the point where Lawrence forswore his commission and joined the enlisted ranks. He is unforgiving - pointing out fault - and praising - where he thought correct, often offending military officers and diplomats who were the subject of his writing.
Undoubtedly a troubled man - and truly an enigma. I choose to remember him as a hero - and an impeachable background source for such diverse aspects as locale and ethnic physical descriptions and European/Arab political intrigue, all still applicable today as a source for my own writing about the Middle East.
In reading Seven Pillars for a second time, I realized how T.E.Lawerance truly loved the desert and its people (the bedowin). I also can now appreciate the fact that Lawerance misplaced/lost/had stolen his first draft (which was near completion or completed) of this novel. I wonder if the second time around, Lawerance improved on his novel. With respect to Lawerance's sexual issues, I think he was more a-sexual (he did not liked to be touched) than heter or homo sexual. Indeed, this would be consistent with his almost fanitical love for the dessert and its solitude. The movie Lawerance of Arabia caught some of this "feeling" but his own work says its much better. This is a novel that is still worth reading, decades after his death. Truly, one of the great men of the 20th Century; an amazing man, who can not be easily "pegged" as so many have tried to do over the years. As with so many of the Greats of the 20th Century, Lawerance was a person with a personality that was complex and multi-layered (cf General Patton) and someone who felt (truly believed) that he was destined, almost "called" to do what he did-- notwithstanding, those who opposed him or who wanted him to fail
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