Of the hundreds of books I have read in my adult life, Hero, the tome devoted to the life, times, and untimely death of Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, is among the best. Gertrude Bell, explorer, archaeologist, and intelligence officer extraordinaire, made several appearances in that book. I was sufficiently intrigued to add Desert Queen by Janet Wallach to my reading list.
Gertrude Bell was as good as advertised. One of the first women to attend Oxford University, she tramped across the desert against the wishes of the British and Ottoman authorities, spoke some half-dozen languages fluently, had the ear of Asquith and Churchill, drew the boundaries of more than one Arab country, installed a king, started a museum, and generally made the moon rise and the stars shine while other women of her generation - proper Victorians, they - drank tea and embroidered cushions. (And I should add that the good Miss Bell had no shortage of contempt for such simpering little ladies.)
Desert Queen, however, was more of a mixed bag. The earliest chapters, in which Gertrude Bell is a young woman finding her way to the East, escaping rogue sheiks, and cutting her teeth as an intrepid agent, are the best. Once World War I breaks out and the questions become all-political all-the-time, Desert Queen has a tendency to become as dry as the surrounding landscape. The political landscape - tribe versus tribe, Shiite versus Sunni, Arab versus Bedouin - is handled much more deftly handled by Michael Korda in Hero. Granted, Wallach delves more deeply into some of the issues unique to Iraq (read: the fight over oil), but in this case I'm not sure all of the details are necessary for the reader to grasp what is at stake.What the two books do share in common is the sense of helplessness that pervades them - the sense of peoples at war for millenia with no end in sight.
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