Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia Paperback – Illustrated, July 12, 2005

Amidst the larger than life figures of the early twentieth century, there were also individuals influenced by their own path that eventually changed as they progressed and unexpectedly made a difference to the rest of the world. From the pages of history and the life that she lived first, as an intellectual and curious world traveler, second archaeologist, and third officer of foreign affairs, Gertrude Bell deserves a place within the annals of history before the world drastically changed after 1914 and thereafter. Historian Janet Wallach writes an immensely detailed biography of her life Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia.Wallach examines the life of Bell through a chronological timeline of her much personal life and of woman of her times, living the life of a socialite in Victorian England well taken care of by her father and to fulfill traditional expectations to the liking of her family. However, as one reads this fascinating story, Bell’s experiences will guide her to places and people that she could not ever imagined, she was the first woman to earn a degree in Modern History at Oxford University. And Wallach reveals with much intimate encounters, the short-lived successes and countless pitfalls of her relationships with potential suitors with or without her family’s approval due to particular circumstances extremely explained in the book. There is no denying, Bell was surrounded by the most prominent individuals of power and wealth, Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, Sir Percy Cox, A.T. Wilson, and numerous Kings and Princes. Each experience also had a place within her adventurous journeys away from England to travels abroad, especially to the Middle East that left a long-term effect on her. Through the research that Wallach completed at the Robinson Library of the University of Newcastle, the letters and diaries and other biographies retelling of Bell’s life, and also, the photographs and the maps that are included in the book, Wallach weaves a narrative of revealing proportions. Indeed, she was a unique woman to have spent many hours and days and years with distinguished figures in the Arab world and the work that she contributed within international relations as a representative to British affairs in the Middle East during the most pivotal periods in history during World War I; her story and the history that she shares, reverberates of the effects of the war on the east and the aftermath of independence for the regions in which she traveled and the realignment of geographical and political boundaries that will be set in place. Bell’s accounts of the lens of history of country and people may resonate of what she saw of colonizer to the colonized. Wallach specifically described this as Bell saw that the world changed by 1919 and her ideas did as well within 180 degrees.The book is an amazing tale of a woman who matured with much dexterity within over 20 year period until her death. Gertrude Bell achieved so much in her lifetime beyond expectation of those closest to her, establish relations between Great Britain and the Arab world, a preservationist to antiquities and created the Baghdad Museum and awarded gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Aside from the accolades, she was a woman in a man’s world that left an experience for many to read and understand a world quite different from its ancient past.

I honestly loved this book and do recommend it. The warning is that it's fairly one-sided. This fascinating, complex, and important woman was as difficult to deal as anyone else so intelligent and certain of their own intelligence. The author writes as if she was difficult only in the eyes of others, noting times when people had problems with her, not that she, herself was difficult. You are given the impression that she was simply smarter than everyone else, that they couldn't keep up. Even the author says she was blunt to the point of being rude and tactless. Elsewhere she quotes someone as saying - I'd have to look it up - that you had to take Bell on her own terms, everything from her very confident point of view. But except for when she was a child the author doesn't allow for this having negative effect on how people interacted with her.Nor does she allow that there might have been times when Bell was wrong. Now and then she does say Bell would "be convinced . . ." from what she'd thought while with one group to what she thought now that she was with a different one. But there's no awareness that it meant Bell was wrong the first time or might be equally wrong this time. Coming up with examples requires going back and reading a great deal of history, that fact that it does shows how much has been left out.Without inclusion that Bell was sometimes difficult and difficult to deal with and why you are left with a far less nuanced understanding. Without including her possibly being wrong you are left with her always being right, so impossible that you start to doubt everything she thought and did.There are other reasons I'd give this only four stars but they are less important and mainly stem from author not using her research to give us an analysis of Bell, simply the result of her own analysis. You find that Bell's life was influenced by the early loss of her mother, deep love of her father, her father's remarriage, and a step-mother who had a perhaps excessively high standard for the children but you have to find it from things said along the way and interpreting them as a whole. The author's research is excellent, including consulting about how a child would respond to the early loss of her mother, but it comes out in tidbits and repeated tidbits instead of Bell's background and how she became the person she was.I really do recommend Desert Queen if you're gathering relevant books. As a bookaholic I'm finally learning to not look into everything that might possibly be of interest because I wake up from it hours later. Because I like what she did with Desert Queen I've searched out reviews and downloaded a sample of Wallach's next one, The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age to see how she did.

A very well written biography of an intrepid woman traveling through the Middle East in the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth.Bolstered by her family's wealth, she was able to employ servants wherever she went and she was welcomed by dignitaries of the various countries she visited. The local conditions were usually primitive, but she traveled with mounds of luggage and some of the luxuries she preferred.Her tolerance for hardship, nevertheless, was commendable.But along the way, one is reminded of the brutalities of human society. She meets acquaintances in some god-forsaken part of the mid-east desert:" The last time she had seen them was in 1905, but the men boomed a hearty welcome and invited her to stay the night. Tall and broad-shouldered, they were as big in heart as in body: they slew a sheep to show her hospitality, piled up a platter of rice in her honor," etc.So much for the human heart..."they slew a sheep". The sheep didn't want to die.Later, during the First World War, Gertrude served in a British office in Egypt, then in Iraq. Eventually she witnessed the Paris peace negotiations in the company of Lawrence of Arabia.Her career in the nascent Iraqi state is told in full and interesting detail. The active life she led holds the reader's interest throughout.The style is superlative. I highly recommend this biography of a remarkable woman.