It’s been a while since we did a book review around here. And while I’m not quite finished with it yet, I’ll go ahead and pronounce Michael Korda’s Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Contrast that with some of the one-star reviews on Amazon:
“Korda takes a fascinating topic and destroys it with horrendously opaque writing. Early on, I encountered, on page 11, a sentence with 51 words. Incredibly, later on the same page there is a sentence with 114 words. There is simply no excuse for this.”
A sentence with 51 words?!? OMG!!! Maybe you should stick with the Twilight series.
“I find the book too detailed, tedious and the author seems to be physco-analizing [sic] T.E. Lawerence [sic]. He keeps straying away from the main theme.”
Um…you do realize, don’t you, that Lawrence is the main theme? And that if Korda wanted to psychoanalyze him (which, 500-odd pages into his 700-page book, he has yet to do), wouldn’t that be in keeping with the “theme”?
“I wanted to like this book, and really tried to. But the first 100 pages are terribly boring. And frankly the writing is not fluid or entertaining. It was a chore to finish.”
