In 1928, T.E. Lawrence wrote to a friend: "Woe's me, I suppose I'll never dig again." British journalist Anthony Sattin (The Gates of Africa) tells the story of Lawrence's happiest years as a field archeologist before World War I, and the experiences that motivated his later career.
Lawrence was an obsessive, adventurous, romantic boy who loved to test his physical limits. He was fascinated by history and artifacts, cycling all over England to collect brass rubbings, plucking antiquities from construction sites, and touring France by bicycle. In 1909, as an Oxford undergraduate, he traveled to the Middle East to study architecture. While walking 30 miles a day in the summer heat and staying in the houses of Arabs and expatriates, he fell in love with the land and the people. When he graduated, he joined the excavation at Carchemish, where, despite clashes with his compatriots and local officials, he enjoyed some of the most rewarding work of his life and developed close relationships with the villagers, including a teenager nicknamed Dahoum who would become one of the most emotionally powerful figures in Lawrence's life.
Sattin has traveled extensively in the places he writes about here, and his passion for that part of the world mirrors Lawrence's. He fills The Young T.E. Lawrence with dramatic beauty, vivid characters and memorable anecdotes drawn from the letters and writings of Lawrence and his contemporaries. This is a sensitive portrait of a secretive legendary man whose favorite years were not the ones that gave him fame. --Sara Catterall