Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands," the dedication begins, "and wrote my will across the sky in stars, to earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house." Lawrence built that house for a dead friend, then spent the rest of the book recording himself unable to live inside it. What follows is his account of the Arab Revolt: two years of camel columns crossing waterless desert, railway lines mined in the dark, Aqaba taken from the landward side when everyone said it could not be done. But the war is only half of it. At Deraa, Turkish soldiers beat and raped him, and something in him never recovered; he came home having promised the Arabs a freedom his own government had already signed away, and he could forgive neither the empire nor himself for it. The prose is dense as Doughty's, built to carry a guilt too large for plain sentences. Few books have made a triumph read so much like a confession.