A keen psychological study that aims at honing leadership skills via example.
A military theorist at the School of Advanced Military Studies looks closely at Lawrence of Arabia’s self-styled conversion into an effective guerrilla leader.
Young, brash, well-schooled and smitten with a romantic idea of Arab culture, T.E. Lawrence (1888 –1935) began to fashion himself in “Arab skin” fairly soon after arriving in the Middle East in 1909 to work on his Oxford University thesis on the Crusades. He learned Arabic and worked on archaeological digs in Turkey and in strategic intelligence in Palestine in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I, Britain’s policy in the region was to “detach the Arabs from the Turks,” in order to bring about the demise of the ailing Ottoman Empire. Though Lawrence often witnessed “an arrogance of power wedded to an ignorance of culture” on the part of the British, he aided the British as a necessary step to Arab independence. When the Arab revolt erupted in 1916, Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arab culture and language, became indispensable to the British as a staff officer and diplomatic conduit. But Lawrence learned quickly that the traditional Western military style of leadership did not suit the Arabs, and during a long hallucinatory spell of sickness, which Schneider elaborates on as conveying “a flash of genius,” Lawrence clarified in his mind the means of guerilla warfare—wear down the opponent by exhaustion rather than annihilation, and by the employment of small, effective “clouds of raiders.” His empathy was key to leadership success, and Schneider takes us through skirmishes at the port of Aqaba, the battle of Tafileh and eventual march to Damascus in 1918. The author bestows on Lawrence the supreme compliment of being an “autonomous leader,” and deeply probes his conflicted sense of helping the Arabs while also being a “fraud” in upholding British imperialism.
A keen psychological study that aims at honing leadership skills via example.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80764-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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