A review by octavia_cade
Queen of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell
4.0
There are some biographies that just make you feel as if you've done nothing with your life. Enter Gertrude Bell, who when not climbing mountains and travelling the globe late in the 19th century, went to the Middle East, fell in love with it, and started working as an archaeologist. And apparently was happy as all get-out, wandering through the countryside, messing about with ruins and making friends with various tribes living out in the desert, all of whom must have been absolutely astonished to see this crazy woman and her ridiculous mountain of luggage traipsing through the sand dunes.
But come WW1, Gertrude's focus begins to change. She comes back home to England, starts working for the Red Cross in France, but fairly soon is back in the ME, because it's clear to pretty much every Briton working there that she's the only real expert in the people of that region that they have. But Gerty has her own agenda, one that's only sometimes supported by her own colonisation-prone government, and that's to cobble an independent nation out of war and conflict... and it turns out this is how Iraq comes into existence. Oh, there are other factors, and I'm not trying to simplify what was clearly a monstrously complex situation, but what this woman managed to achieve is nothing short of incredible. I'd never heard of her before fishing this book off the shelves of the local library but I'm so glad I picked it up because the whole thing is fascinating. Howell's biography is particularly readable, very attuned to personality and character, and though occasionally dense in places (as the focus on politics picks up, there's a lot of names and details to keep track of) it's still a genuinely entertaining story, as well as an informative one.
But come WW1, Gertrude's focus begins to change. She comes back home to England, starts working for the Red Cross in France, but fairly soon is back in the ME, because it's clear to pretty much every Briton working there that she's the only real expert in the people of that region that they have. But Gerty has her own agenda, one that's only sometimes supported by her own colonisation-prone government, and that's to cobble an independent nation out of war and conflict... and it turns out this is how Iraq comes into existence. Oh, there are other factors, and I'm not trying to simplify what was clearly a monstrously complex situation, but what this woman managed to achieve is nothing short of incredible. I'd never heard of her before fishing this book off the shelves of the local library but I'm so glad I picked it up because the whole thing is fascinating. Howell's biography is particularly readable, very attuned to personality and character, and though occasionally dense in places (as the focus on politics picks up, there's a lot of names and details to keep track of) it's still a genuinely entertaining story, as well as an informative one.