Outside, the weather has grown bleak and wintry, and north of Washington the world is digging out after a major snowstorm. What better time, then, to turn to the Middle Eastern adventures of the youthful T.E. Lawrence, the Oxford-educated archaeologist who, as this book ends, discovers an astonishing destiny? For who could ever have imagined that, in the midst of World War I, a young scholar would lead the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire and by the age of 30 become the stuff of legend?