Barb, I find your posts so stimulating. Yes, what a mess we're in. Anarchy rules the world. And judging by the title of his latest book, World Order, even Dr. Kissinger has given up on diplomacy. The world needs a policeman. The isolationists were right. Having turned our backs on the old world, with its zillion grudges, we should have stayed with our new frontier orientation.
For booklovers there's always another option. I found it put very well by T.E. Lawrence himself, quoted in Michael Korda's Hero: '...but if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys - not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again.'
And Frybabe, you're right about Seven Pillars of Wisdom being too grand for a pocketbook format. According to another quote from the same book, Lawrence '...spent a fortune by any standard paying artists to do the paintings and the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and having the copies individually bound in leather by the finest bookbinders in England
But back to the Sunni and Shia, revelling in their differnces. What an amazing spectacle. Barb, you turn history into a hall of mirrors. What fun!