Best Ever
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Brilliant. T E Lawrence poured his soul into this magnificently crafted autobiography. It takes you from his arrival in Cairo as an upstart academic, through his dramatic evolution into a desert soldier/strategist and leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks, to his ultimate failure to win justice for the people he'd grown to be part of. Lawrence was a gifted writer as well as an extraordinary soldier and I was fascinated by the insights that run through it: into his political naivety, his ambivalent loyalties, and the hints of concern (almost certainly ill-founded) about his own mental state. The combination of high politics and personal danger, played out in the dramatic and mysterious Arab world as it meets the West is quite magnificent.
The writing style is nineteenth century and the language and prose may be unfamiliar to many but this is the most rewarding book I have read. It's the one I unhesitatingly offer as the best ever.
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Mellifluous but Dense
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Jim Norton's mellifluous voice is pleasant to listen to but does little to improve the clarity of Lawrence's already dense writing for the listener. Where the reader has the chance to go back to try to clarify a contorted Lawrence sentence, the listener really has no such opportunity and the result is hard work in concentrating on the flow of the text so as not to miss the purpose of the sentence. Lawrence thought of himself as a new Shakespeare - but unfortunately did not have Shakespeare's intuitive feeling for language so the slightly quirky cadences adopted by Norton coupled with rather brutal editing make this a reading that has to be listened to with concentration. Not recommended for in-car listening -- or even listening while doing the ironing!
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A book for bedtime.....
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Are you a philosopher? - Read no further, you might enjoy this book, if you can stay awake long enough - for the rest of us, this book, unlike its author, is just not interesting - it's too long-winded.
Definitely NOT a book to read in the 21st Century, it's just NOT of our time - the title is the most interesting thing about it.
It's about as interesting as that dull little tome by Ann Robinson.....zzzzzzzzzzz ......time for bed...
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Seven Pillars of Wisdom - A stunning read
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Whilst travelling through Wadi Rum in Jordan a few years ago i was haunted in my mind by images of the enigmatic character that was Lawrence of Arabia; part legend, part myth, part wrong person in the wrong place at the right time. To read this book is to know the man, the journeys, the politics, the battles. Although he himself admitted to his own ambiguity and uselessness as a British Pawn in the middle east, this book goes some way to dispel the Myth. A must for anyone who is interested in the middle east, british / arab politics and a very colourful man
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Lawrence of Arabia from his own point of view
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Having been a geat fan of the David Lean film ever since my father took me as a 7 year old boy to see it when it was first released, I had intended to read Lawrence's own account of the events covered by the film for a long time. The book itself is a mixture of autobiographical recounting of the events covered by the film and a travelogue interspersed with almost essay type observations by Lawrence on a wide variety of subjects including the plight of the Arabs, their culture, his own motivation and the wartime life of soldiers in general. Most of the book is descriptive with very little in the way of dialogue and it can at times become very difficult to persevere with, particularly during the author's sometimes extreme moments of navel-gazing. However, the persistent reader is taken on a unique journey with Lawrence through his adventures, middle eastern culture and the spectacular desert scenery of the area. When the time came to part I was rather sorry that the journey was over as Lawrence is, if nothing else, an extremely knowledgeable guide. Taken as an adjunct to the film (which takes a certain amount of artistic licence with the facts) the book deepens one's understanding of its political, geographical and personal context and provides a unique insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the man himself.
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