In an impressively clear and eloquent writing style, archaeologist and historian Neil Faulkner has produced a detailed history of the struggle for control of the Middle East during World War I, including the political and military alliance between the Germans and the Ottomans and the collaboration between the British and the Arabs, in which he stresses T. E. Lawrence's campaign. Among many interesting questions he explores in Lawrence of Arabia's War: The Arabs, the British, and the Remaking of the Middle East in WWI are the reasons why the Turks chose to ally themselves with the Germans and why Australians, who became a major component of the British army in the eastern war, would volunteer to join the conflict when there was no conscription for this war in Australia.

Faulkner shows how the British under the command of General Allenby, and the Turks and Germans under the command of the Germans Kress von Kressenstein and Liman von Sanders, among others, compared as fighters. He also discusses the initial weakness of Sherif Hussein's Arab forces and then explains their improvement under the leadership of Lawrence, who advised the sherif's son Feisal, the nominal leader of the Arab Revolt. Almost with the eye of a commander, Faulkner carefully details the many battles he discusses, including the attack at Beersheba that opened the way to British victory at Gaza, thirty miles to the west.

The Fourth Australian Light Horse charge on the Turkish line at Beersheba was one of the last great cavalry charges in military history, and, as Faulkner states, it became legendary. It was reenacted by the Australians at the now Israeli city of Beersheba (pronounced Beersheva in Hebrew) in 2007, ninety years after the attack took place, and the city contains an Australian military cemetery as well as a statue of General Allenby. Faulkner is very good indeed at explaining the details of the actual moves in the battle itself and even the capacities of the various weapons used during it. He also convincingly describes Lawrence's attack at Akaba and attacks on the Turkish Hejaz railway, and he shows how British deception led the Turks to believe that the major British blow which essentially destroyed the Turkish army—an event that he analyzes in great detail—would fall in the east when in fact it came at Megiddo in the north of what is now Israel and was therefore aptly termed “Armageddon” by the British, because the Book of Revelation (16:14, 16:16) situates the final battle of the end times there.

Faulkner also deserves praise for allowing the reader to feel the tormented personal situation of the fighters on both sides. He stresses the Turkish army's meager food rations, its soldiers' lack of pay and their antiquated firearms, the lack of sufficient machine guns, artillery, and ammunition, the poor military hospitals, the poor roads, and even the mistreatment of pack animals. He discusses the trench situation of the British fighters in Sinai in great detail, revealing their misery in the face of flies, lice, scorpions, and mice, as well as a terrible diet that caused stomach ailments and produced septic sores.

While Faulkner stresses European colonialism, blaming it for most of the Middle East's past and present problems, he does not neglect other elements that influenced British leaders like Prime Minister Lloyd George and General Allenby, especially biblical beliefs. But while he quotes Lawrence's statement that Allenby's capture of Jerusalem was the most momentous moment of the war for him, even more so than the capture of Damascus, he does not mention the fact that during the Wilderness of Zin survey before the war, Lawrence and archaeologist C. Leonard Woolley solved an important biblical problem by identifying Ain el-Qudeirat rather than Ain Kadesh as the site of Kadesh-Barnea, from whence, according to the Bible, Moses sent men to scout out Canaan (Deuteronomy 1:2, 1:19, 2:1; Numbers 13:3–21); their conclusion is accepted by contemporary scholars. Surprisingly, he also does not mention that Lawrence brokered a peace agreement between Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement, and Feisal at Versailles after the war, the only such agreement between the Jews and Arabs until the Begin-Sadat agreement of 1978. Moreover, while he stresses a propagandistic story created by Aaron Aaronsohn, one the founding members of Netzakh Yisrael Lo Yeshaker, or NILI, the secret Jewish organization that spied for the British in Palestine, he scants this organization's considerable contribution to the success of Allenby's campaign. And while he mentions Aaron's sister and fellow NILI leader Sarah in the context of Aaron's propaganda, he does not mention her tragic torture by the Turks and her heroic suicide at the age of twenty-six to keep herself from divulging the organization's secrets to them.

Throughout, although he understandably devotes less time to Lawrence than do books focusing exclusively on the Arab Revolt, Faulkner is very sharp in his analysis of Lawrence's mental states during the war, which fluctuated between elation and depression, and he also pays proper tribute to Lawrence's superb military skills and to the value of Lawrence's Arabian and Syrian campaign to the larger British campaign in Palestine. On the whole, Faulkner has told very well the military and political story of World War I in the Middle East and Lawrence's role in it; and scholars of Lawrence, World War I, and the Middle East will benefit greatly from reading this book.