Schneider’s new book on T.E. Lawrence reviewed right here by a friend of the blog

I asked frequent commenter Tyrtaios if he’d be interested in reviewing the new book on Lawrence. The game was not rigged — I told him he could write anything he wanted. But to my relief, he liked it.

By “Tyrtaios”
Best Defense guest book reviewer

A noted fellow soldier and countryman of T.E. Lawrence, Sir William Francis Butler, wrote: “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

Thus starts in part, the preface of James J. Schneider’s Guerrilla Leader: T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, along with a crisp and pithy forward by Tom Ricks, which will start the reader to understand that Lawrence’s strength wasn’t his ability to fight a guerrilla campaign, but more importantly, to lead one and how the man came to accomplish that, and a chronicle of events in doing so.

Once I picked the book up, I had to force myself to put it down and savor it. I found the book flowed very easily and quickly from describing Lawrence as a child prodigy, to his early characteristic of standing out from the crowd with a higher purpose, his education at Oxford that reinforced, interestingly to be sure, learning over solving the problem, to his early adventure in the pre-WWI Middle East, along with his gathering notoriety as a most remarkable individual.

The reader will further be provided with a concise description of the regional geo-political-military back-drop of the period that Lawrence would find himself operating in, and quickly move to Lawrence’s most notable observations that would form his ideas, and vision of organizing the Bedouin in the north into a cohesive unconventional force, along with developing and lending to it, what I would categorize as a combined arms dimension.

Having read extensively about T.E. Lawrence prior, did I learn anything new reading Guerrilla Leader? Indeed, I was reminded by Schneider in his closing pages, something I wished had been explained to me many years ago as a younger man, something that vaguely nagged at me then, which caused Lawrence to betray his values, but he must have later grasped. I will leave that part undisclosed for the curious of you to find out, perhaps among those curious, that one “dangerous man who dreams by day with open eyes and makes it possible,” as Lawrence tells us he did.

Schneider’s Guerrilla Leader could easily replace several books all at once that I’ve seen on the recommended military reading lists for NCOs and commissioned officers alike, as well as those in mufti that work beside the military or cover it. 

In closing, although I own other works on Lawrence of Arabia, I have decided that Guerrilla Leader will take a position next to the man’s own words written in Seven Pillars of Wisdom on my book shelf … too late for me now, but for some … perhaps not?

“Tyrtaios” is a retired infantry Marine whose career spanned 28 years of both enlisted and commissioned service, and included several tours of duty in the Middle East and Africa.