A biography of T.E. Lawrence, of the linear narrative, pop-psychology school. Asher, himself an explorer and author of numerous books (A Desert Dies, 1987, etc.) braids his rudimentary psychologizing with a chronological approach to Lawrence’s life, from his Oxford youth in the “long bright Indian summer of Old England before the Great War changed the world forever,” to the motorcycle crash that terminated his “masochistic world of reverse values—for him pain was pleasure, servitude freedom, and self-denial orgiastic self-indulgence.” Asher sees most everything in Lawrence’s life filtered through that lens of masochism, the roots of which he finds in Lawrence’s mother’s smothering embrace. Crippled by all the attention, Lawrence assumed a “self-fashioned mantle of oddness”: awkward, remote, homosexual at a time when it could earn you a jail term, thriving where his English mates dwindled—in places such as the Near East, where he first went on archaeological digs. The relations Lawrence struck with the Arabs were characterized by the “paternal benevolence of the autocrat,” according to Asher, and Arabia was a fantasy land wherein he could play out his youthful obsessions with the medieval, slipping into Arab garb, finding “a delight in being that ‘baron in the feudal system’, a European in the East.” Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt is treated as straight rousing military history. It gives Asher, who follows in Lawrence’s footsteps for much of the book, a chance to add some corrections to the Lawrencian legend; for instance, it takes three full days to cross Sinai, not the fabled 49 hours. Then came the postwar, odd-peg years; evidently uncomfortable outside of the military, he tries to reenlist; the hero goes looking for the oblivion of the enlisted man, “towards degradation, poverty, self-denial and enslavement,” that reverse exhibitionism learned at his mother’s knee. “Lawrence was perhaps the first international megastar of the century,” Asher suggests, and this rather narrow biography pays due homage. (49 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-712-3
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
