Nine-tenths of everything is teachable, but it is that last irrational tenth that is the test of genius; flashing like a kingfisher across a pool (with apologies for mangling the quote). T.E. Lawrence ws undoubtedly possessed of genius, that kind of madness which extended the British Empire across the globe in the absence of rational plans or mechanisms. In this book, a kind of modernist Illiad Lawrence writes about the creation of the Arab Revolt as a nearly perfect guerrilla war. He helped organize bandit tribes into an army, negotiating between the stolid Near East Imperial bureaucracy and the welter of feuds and desire for glory and plunder that characterized the multifaceted and undisciplined Arab army. This force was like a gas, its front everywhere and nowhere as it bled the Turks dry through constant raiding and demolitions.

Lawrence guides us on camel treks across thousands of miles of desert, into tense battles with Turkish armored trains, rolling charges by armored car and bombings by airplane. He has some gifts as a describer of place and landscape, but the people all seem blandly interchangable, aside from a few standouts like Sheikh Feisal and Auda the bandit-warrior. Pain and deprivation are like food to Lawrence, who learned to do more with less, but his ultimate acts would be to betray his Arabs to the forces of Empire, dividing a free people into the nations of the Sykes-Picot agreement.