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.