Students Meet Author Scott Anderson

“No four-hour movie can do real justice to the bureaucratic rumblings, the myriad spies, heroes and villains, the dense fugue of humanity at its best and worst operating in the Mideast war theater of 1914-17. Thrillingly, Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia . . . . does exactly that, weaving enormous detail into its five-hundred-plus pages with a propulsive narrative thread.”

— USA Today

The Desert Literary Society invited Dr. Carr, Ms. Zachik, and eight students to meet Lawrence in Arabia author Scott Anderson at their March luncheon. Before the luncheon, the PVS students met with Anderson in a small conference room at the Renaissance Esmeralda. Students were free to ask questions of the author, questions about his writing process, his investigative process. Most often, however, the questions turned to the Middle East. Anderson spent years living in and researching the Middle East. The subject of his recent book was Englishman T.E. Lawrence (often known as “Lawrence of Arabia”) during WWI and the forming of the modern Middle East. PVS students wanted to know “How could things be different?” “Better?” and “What’s in the future for the Middle East?”

Before being escorted into the ballroom, Anderson signed the students’ personal copies of Lawrence in Arabia.