Who was Gertrude Bell? If she were a character in a novel, you would have to file the book under "fantasy." She spent the first two decades of the Twentieth Century exploring the Middle East. She was an archeologist, military intelligence officer and king-maker who literally drew the boundaries of Iraq.
Gertrude Bell was a study in contradictions: She was a wealthy Englishwoman who spent months at a time living in a tent in the desert. She never went out unchaperoned when at home in Britain, but then acted as no other woman of her class had done when she explored the Middle East desert on horse and camel. She was the first woman to earn first class honors at Oxford University, yet she opposed women's suffrage and had few women friends. She respected the Arabs as people, but she never questioned Britain's right to rule over them.
After World War I ended, the victorious European powers met to divide up the "spoils of war". Despite U.S. President Wilson's support of the right of self-determination and British promises of self-rule to gain Arab support during the war, the Allies proceeded to draw new boundaries and install governments that let them maintain control over millions of people. The consequences were, in many cases, disastrous. This chapter of history may not have been part of our high school curriculum, but it is well known to the people affected in the Middle East. Desert Queen is a good introduction to this period.
The book, however, does have its shortcomings. I felt Wallach's descriptions often crossed from description into invention. She needed an editor with a firm hand, someone who could suspend her poetic license and eliminate distracting phrases that are out of place in a biography. According to Wallach, Gertrude Bell "wrote with an almost audible sigh" (how could anyone know whether she sighed or not?). A room had "the smell of typewriter ribbons and polished furniture mixed with the scent of secrecy" (what does secrecy smell like?). "Fiery rumors were spreading like a flame on kerosene, burning nationalist ambition" (how do rumors and ambition burn?). Early in the book, I stumbled on a glaring factual error: Wallach describes the Boer War as raging between England and Germany in 1897; the war in fact was waged in South Africa between England and the Boer (Dutch) settlers and it did not start until 1899. This made me suspicious of Wallach's scholarship and sent me on fact-checking expeditions as I continued through the book. I am happy to say that I found that her other points of reference were accurate.
Despite these criticisms, Desert Queen is well worth reading as an introduction to the history of the Middle East.