The Remarkable Journey of Gertrude Bell: A Biography of the Intrepid Desert Queen

Leon: A very thorough and interesting biography of this most amazing woman. One of the best accounts of desert peoples and how they lived. She needs to have her place in history restored.

Canada on Sep 29, 2023

Rick Paylor: it arrived promptly

United States on Sep 06, 2023

eottilie: El precio y las buenas condiciones a pesar de ser de segunda mano

Spain on Jan 09, 2023

Steve in Ottawa: Gertrude Bell was the most amazing woman who you have never heard about. She accomplished a lot more than T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) but due to her reluctance to promote herself (and the fact that she was a woman in a man's world) seems to have been left out of the history books.

The book describes her life from her childhood up to her death in Baghdad. It is very well written and includes photographs from her life. It is very detailed and by the end of it I learned so much about the region, its history and the life of an incredible woman.

Canada on Jul 21, 2022

Amazon Customer: A decent book, let down only by the fact that the author continually refers to England when she means the United Kingdom. She obviously does not know that England has not been an independent country since 1707 and that the Scottish Crown took over the English Crown in 1603. Such schoolboy errors ruin an otherwise enjoyable read.

United Kingdom on Dec 16, 2021

TBiscuit: This is quite a detailed work of Gertrude Bell. Without doubt she was a woman of robust physical and intellectual stamina", speaking multiple languages including many Arabic, hiking and climbing punishing mountain ranges. "Shrewd" was an accurate description of her quick intellect and thought process. Recruited as a spy in WWI, she went on to spend much of her life in the Middle East. Not a woman that I can admire considering she was part and parcel of colonial/imperial meddling by the powers that be. Britain, France and Germany were still at the height of their Middle East imperialism and it could be argued, that it is due to Miss Bell and Britain that Iraq today is a mess. TE Lawrence was also involved in these machinations (made famous as "Lawrence of Arabia", viewed as a fake and fraud by author Richard Aldington who this reader recommends on this subject). Bell was anti-suffragette and railed against the Balfour Agreement in which however she was correct in a number of predictions on that matter. A fascinating read considering how today, this region continues to be in turmoil and the history of Iraq and Miss Bell are forever inexorably entwined.

United States on Mar 01, 2021

E. Kovar: I honestly loved this book and do recommend it. The warning is that it's fairly one-sided. This fascinating, complex, and important woman was as difficult to deal as anyone else so intelligent and certain of their own intelligence. The author writes as if she was difficult only in the eyes of others, noting times when people had problems with her, not that she, herself was difficult. You are given the impression that she was simply smarter than everyone else, that they couldn't keep up. Even the author says she was blunt to the point of being rude and tactless. Elsewhere she quotes someone as saying - I'd have to look it up - that you had to take Bell on her own terms, everything from her very confident point of view. But except for when she was a child the author doesn't allow for this having negative effect on how people interacted with her.

Nor does she allow that there might have been times when Bell was wrong. Now and then she does say Bell would "be convinced . . ." from what she'd thought while with one group to what she thought now that she was with a different one. But there's no awareness that it meant Bell was wrong the first time or might be equally wrong this...

United States on Jan 11, 2019

R. DelParto: Amidst the larger than life figures of the early twentieth century, there were also individuals influenced by their own path that eventually changed as they progressed and unexpectedly made a difference to the rest of the world. From the pages of history and the life that she lived first, as an intellectual and curious world traveler, second archaeologist, and third officer of foreign affairs, Gertrude Bell deserves a place within the annals of history before the world drastically changed after 1914 and thereafter. Historian Janet Wallach writes an immensely detailed biography of her life Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia.

Wallach examines the life of Bell through a chronological timeline of her much personal life and of woman of her times, living the life of a socialite in Victorian England well taken care of by her father and to fulfill traditional expectations to the liking of her family. However, as one reads this fascinating story, Bell’s experiences will guide her to places and people that she could not ever imagined, she was the first woman to earn a degree in Modern History at Oxford...

United States on Jun 22, 2016

WALSHY: The Redcar Woman who could set off World War Three.

This headline might look over-dramatic, but I'm using it as a deliberate introduction to one of this area's most famous, and, I will argue, most over-indulged celebrities - Gertrude Bell from Redcar.

I write as a local Redcar district reader, and conscious that this lady is locally lionized,

Alas this book doesn;t help to give a balanced view of Miss Bell and the consequences of her life for today's Middle East.

Gertrude Bell is locally famed as a pioneer explorer of Arabia and a friend of T E Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia. There is a statue of her riding on a camel on Redcar Sea Front, she is fetted as one of the North's star women, and most vitally for future headlines, she is to be played by Hollywood Star, Nicole Kidman as the lead role alongside Damien Lewis in a new film about Gertrude's lives and loves. The film,"Queen of the Desert', directed by Werner Herzog, is now being filmed in the Middle East and is due for release this year.

But I would argue that we need to take a hard look behind the adulation. I have, and I am not sure I liked what I saw.

This depiction of Gertrude cast...

United Kingdom on Mar 07, 2014