Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20405 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-29
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374531355
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this hefty, thoroughly enjoyable biography of Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), English journalist Howell describes her subject as not only "the most famous British traveler of her day, male or female" but as a "poet, scholar, historian, mountaineer, photographer, archaeologist, gardener, cartographer, linguist and distinguished servant of the state." As Howell observes, "Gertrude always had to have a project," and she manages to bring those multitudinous projects, studies and adventures to life on the page. "I decided," Howell writes, "to use many more of her own words than would appear in a conventional biography": a felicitous decision when the subject's letters, diaries and publications are as seamlessly incorporated in Howell's engaging text as they are. Bell's role in the creation of Iraq and the placement of Faisal upon the throne, is fully detailed, both to honor her power and to haunt us today. But the strength and delight of Howell's superb biography is in the fullness with which Bell's character is drawn. Having clearly fallen in love with her subject (though not blind to her warts), Howell leaves no stone unturned—family history, school days, Bell's clothes, sometimes her meals, her friendships, her servants, her thousands of miles traveled, her fluency in languages (Persian, Turkish, Arabic) and, yes, her romances. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Late Victorian England was the best place in history to be a rich man. You had telephones and cars, lots of servants, great tailors, good food, and of course a hefty portion of the globe at your command. Your opinions carried weight. Women learned small talk and French in order to please you. You stood at the very pinnacle of the evolutionary struggle. And then, as this colorful new biography suggests, there was Gertrude.

Explorer, travel writer, translator of Sufi verse, intelligent, devoid of fear, Gertrude Bell was a scholar and a spy whose extraordinary career spanned the heyday of the British Empire and culminated in the creation of Iraq. She seems to have excelled at everything she tried -- except finding someone to fall in love with her.

From the outset she was something of a phenomenon. She came from a supremely rich industrialist family in Yorkshire; the Bells were liberal and well-connected. Her perceptive stepmother allowed Gertrude first to attend school, and then go up to Oxford, where her formidable intellect and self-confidence made her the first woman to take a first in Modern History, in 1888. She was later to be the first woman to receive a prize from the Royal Geographical Society and the first woman officer to work for British military intelligence. She was not a feminist, however; she was a leading light in the campaign to deny women the vote.

Marriage was the target at which women were locked and loaded. Not Bell. She was presented at court, like other girls of her class; but rather than pursue a husband she established her reputation as a fearless mountaineer, climbing unscaled Alpine peaks in her underwear. A visit to Tehran awakened her interest in the Middle East, and within two years she had not only mastered classical Persian but also published an acclaimed translation of the poetry of Hafiz. Arabic came next, with well-equipped expeditions into the Arabian desert, meeting with Bedouin, surveying archaeological sites. She traveled as a desert queen, with a train of servants and voluminous luggage -- parasols, pistols, evening gowns, a canvas bath, silver hairbrushes, the works. Handing out Zeiss telescopes to the sheikhs she encountered in their tents, she amassed an extraordinary knowledge of the politics and personalities of the Arab world. It was this that made her briefly indispensable to the British government, after the outbreak of World War I.

Georgina Howell recounts these stories with a wide-eyed admiration that is, for the most part, infectious, and her long book is a gripping read. Often pursuing themes in Bell's life, rather than bald chronology, she introduces her readers to the atmosphere of Oxford colleges, to the perils and excitements of the Alps, and to the dangers and decorum of desert life. If the book has a flaw, it is that Howell is too entranced by her subject to give the reader the critical distance in which to view and form a judgment on Bell's career. The more Howell admires her subject, the more we are tempted to doubt. Can she really stand beside Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great? What are we to make of a rival traveler and writer, Sir Mark Sykes, fulminating nastily in a letter to his wife: "Confound the silly, chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!"

Howell delicately avoids the ramifications of Bell's actions as the midwife of modern Iraq. We know that Iraq was a mess. Anglo-French policy in the Middle East was a double-cross. In order to divert the Turks from the Dardanelles and secure the oil fields of Iraq, the British encouraged a pan-Arab revolt against the tottering Ottoman empire, engineered by Bell's irrepressible old friend T.E. Lawrence. Bell knew, as he did, that Allied promises of a fully independent Arabia were hollow. The French were set on gaining control of Syria, and everyone wanted to bash the Turks; the British wanted their oil. Bell herself was very fond of Faisal, scion of an aristocratic family in Mecca who grew up to be a brave warrior and went out of his way to court her, and so she found him a kingdom: Iraq, which was strung together out of the most unlikely constituents. The British did their best to run it on the cheap.

For Bell herself, the outcome must have been disappointing. Rather than allow the treasures of Mesopotamia to be carted off to foreign museums, she established the National Museum in Baghdad. (It was looted, tragically, in 2003.) By the mid-'20s she was a marginalized figure in Baghdad, where she died in 1926 at the age of 57. The empty pill box by her bed suggested suicide.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The breadth and depth of Gertrude Bell's accomplishments are extraordinary. Born to British industrial wealth and civic prominence during the Victorian era, she possessed boundless self-confidence, courage, and vitality. The first woman to earn top honors in history at Oxford, Bell was fluent in six languages, and became an intrepid traveler and celebrated mountaineer. Tragically unlucky in love, she romanced the world instead. Discovering her spiritual home in the Middle East, Bell transformed herself into a cartographer, archaeologist, writer, and photographer as she undertook perilous journeys to fabled desert outposts, commanding the respect of powerful Bedouin sheikhs. During World War I, Bell became the expert on Mesopotamia for British military intelligence, and a more crucial force in the forming of modern Iraq than that of her friend, T. E. Lawrence. From Cairo to Basra to Baghdad, Bell, against fierce adversity, devoted herself to justice. Howell writes with all the verve, historical veracity, and acumen her intoxicating subject demands--her spectacular biography leaves the reader lost in admiration and steeped in sorrow. It seems that all the profound knowledge about the culture of the desert Bell placed herself in jeopardy to gather was promptly forgotten. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Timely Ttreatment of Perennially Fascinating Person
Current events in star crossed Iraq have brought out a renewed interest in Gertrude Bell (GLB). Much of it seems political, concerned with pointing fingers at "causes" for the current situation as arising out of the World War One aftermath. As is typical of today's shallow, axe-grinding treatment of history, most of what I see being described as Miss Bell's role at that time is overly generalized, if not downright misleading. Many absorbing biographies on GLB have been published. This one, esp. in the "Government By Gertrude" chapter," does a very nice job of showing the devil in the details of how King Faisal, his small staff, and English advisors pulled off something (i.e., guiding Iraq from a leadership mish mash to becoming an independent state) that moderns are still in a quandry as to how it may be done ... again. Keeping the cradle of civilization peaceful and prosperous, in spite of pressures from war lords and religious gangsters fighting over hegemony, and other nations wanting to plunder its resources, may always be a problem, and that is visible in this presentation as you see financial depression and ill health cutting drastically short the time Faisal, and Gertrude (herself the last of the British advisors to care that the Iraqi's got a fair deal out of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire) have to stabilize the milieu resulting from the 1919 WW I Peace Treaty settlements. Also, a vivid description of GLB's climbing adventures is given in this book so that what seems unbelievable for its time becomes undeniably substantiated. In spite of there being great volumes of data available as source material for Gretrude Bell stories, there is still much that has not been explicated, and much that will always remain mysterious from the time when she was a "spy" associated with the Arab Bureau. New pictures and references to some contemporary accounts not widely revealed make this a worthwhile acquisition for a devotee of the study of Gertrude and the remarkable people of the late Victorian, Edwardian, and World War I periods in English history. It may not be long before what's published on Gertrude will catch up with what's been done for her Arab Bureau cohort, T. E. Lawrence. I do have a big question, however, about a footnote at the bottom of page 373 that indicates a source as "Ronald Bodley, a descendant of Gertrude's ..." Hmmm. The word "descendant" usually implies relationship denoting a blood offspring. Gertrude was supposedly a "spinster" and without issue. Should the term "relative" be more aptly used in this case, or does the author have something more compelling to reveal?! Finally, I wish book editors would be more encouraging of authors to give some details, in epilogues for example, about the adventures they encountered while doing research for their subject; about all we have is what we see brought out on C-Cpan Book TV.

Fascinating, Solidly Researched Biography
Gertrude Bell is someone I've come across many times -- in everything from scholarly to not-so-scholarly history books to the writings of Vita Sackville-West -- but until I picked up Georgina Howell's richly detailed and expertly written book, the woman I had glimpsed over the years merely suggested a wealthy Victorian woman (which Bell was) known more for her eccentricity than actual wit (not remotely the case).

Intellectually brilliant (fluent in 6 languages, including Arabic and Persian, and was the first woman to take a "first" at Oxford in Modern History), supremely courageous, wise and very human, I have been delighted and honored to at last sit down with Gertrude Bell and over the course of 300+ pages, make her acquaintance. In Howell's capable hands, Bell comes quickly and fully to life, holding my attention and demanding my admiration.

A somewhat unexpected bonus have been the extraordinary (and harrowing) tales of Bell's journeys across the Bedouin deserts in the years before the first world war. I've come away from these accounts (with their accompanying photographs, courtesy of Bell, who in addition to her other gifts was an accomplished photographer) with a more profound understanding of the middle-eastern world that we encounter today.

I recommend this book without reservation to anyone with an interest in middle-eastern history, Victorian women, early 20th century achievements in mountain climbing, Victorian history -- and more. It's all there. It's a great book, about an extraordinary life. And it should be required reading for anyone who imagines himself or herself to be knowledgeable about the middle-east, or who wants to know more. Unlike so many "mid-east experts" Bell truly was an expert, with knowledge born of a great passion for that world, served by a magnificient wisdom and intelligence.

In Search of a New Gertrude Bell for Fixing Iraq
Georgina Howell brings to life Gertrude Bell, a woman whose accomplishments deserve to be better known than they have been. Born into the sixth-richest family in Britain in 1868, Bell got an education equal to that of a man. Young Bell was a "social hand grenade" due to her extraordinary self-confidence and intellectual brilliance. Bell did not get along well with the less developed personalities and intellects around her.

Despite her efforts to get married and have a family of her own, Bell never managed to find true happiness. As Howell clearly demonstrates through her book, Bell never fully recovered from the premature death of Henry Cadogan, with whom she fell in love in 1892. Bell fluctuated all her life between looking for personal fulfillment and devoting herself to the well-being of the community for no reward.

Despite these repeated setbacks in her private life, Bell would emerge as one of the most important architects of the modern Middle East. Bell first discovered the region when she traveled to Persia (modern Iran) in 1892. Bell's obsession with archeology became the driver behind her desert expeditions before WWI. Bell published different books about her archeological findings and learned to speak Arabic on top of five other languages during that period.

The knowledge that Bell got about the Middle East and its people proved invaluable when Britain fought the Turks in the region during the Great War. The same knowledge played a decisive roll in leading the Arabs to nationhood in the aftermath of WWI. Unsurprisingly, Bell has been compared to T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, who launched the Arab Revolt. Unlike Lawrence, Bell remained dedicated to the cause of Arabs until they played a leading role in countries such as Transjordan (modern Jordan) and Iraq. Thanks to Bell's managerial skills, Iraq emerged as a working Sunni-dominated polity under the leadership of King Faisal by the time of her suicide in Baghdad in 1926.

Most importantly, Howell gives contemporary readers some valuable insights into modern Iraq that I had the privilege to discover long before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The chapter "Government through Gertrude" is probably the most fascinating and also the most relevant of all in fixing a broken Iraq. Bell was someone that every prominent man in Iraq, regardless of races, creeds, and allegiances, could trust. Bell kept her word and was fearless in trusting her life to these prominent men when traveling alone in their lands. Bell not only won trust for the British administration, but also worked on improving relationships between the different races, creeds, and allegiances. Unsurprisingly, Bell was greeted as "Khatun," i.e., desert queen, or "Umm al Muminin," i.e., Mother of the Faithful, after Ayishah, the wife of Prophet Muhammad.