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War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Doubleday
August 2013
On Sale: August 6, 2013
592 pages
ISBN: 038553292X
EAN: 9780385532921
Kindle: B00BH0VSPI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic
and consequential periods in 20th century history – the Arab
Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle
East The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War
A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the
most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history
– the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the
Middle East
The
Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the
words of T.E. Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.”
Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western
combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern
theater. As a result, the conflict was shaped to a
remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and
low-level officers far removed from the corridors of
power.
Curt Prüfer was an effete
academic attached to the German embassy in Cairo, whose
clandestine role was to foment Islamic jihad against British
rule. Aaron Aaronsohn was a renowned agronomist and
committed Zionist who gained the trust of the Ottoman
governor of Syria. William Yale was the fallen scion of the
American aristocracy, who traveled the Ottoman Empire on
behalf of Standard Oil, dissembling to the Turks in order
gain valuable oil concessions. At the center of it all
was Lawrence. In early 1914 he was an archaeologist
excavating ruins in the sands of Syria; by 1917 he was the
most romantic figure of World War One, battling both the
enemy and his own government to bring about the vision he
had for the Arab people.
The intertwined paths
of these four men – the schemes they put in place, the
battles they fought, the betrayals they endured and
committed – mirror the grandeur, intrigue and tragedy of the
war in the desert. Prüfer became Germany’s grand
spymaster in the Middle East. Aaronsohn constructed an
elaborate Jewish spy-ring in Palestine, only to have the
anti-Semitic and bureaucratically-inept British first ignore
and then misuse his organization, at tragic personal
cost. Yale would become the only American intelligence
agent in the entire Middle East – while still secretly on
the payroll of Standard Oil. And the enigmatic
Lawrence rode into legend at the head of an Arab army, even
as he waged secret war against his own nation’s imperial
ambitions.
Based on years of intensive primary
document research, LAWRENCE IN ARABIA definitively overturns
received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was
formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its
portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction
wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that
brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past
creates the anguish of the present.
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