Please note, the 5 stars are for Lawrence's book, not the publisher, which I will get to in a second.Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a challenging read, but like so many challenges, the reward is made greater through the difficulty of the test. Lawrence's language and syntax are unfamiliar to the modern reader, but it is beautiful in its descriptions of the desert and Lawrence's life in the Arab Revolt in WWI. The book was written from memory after his previous version, written from his war journal, was lost on a train journey. He had destroyed the journal after completion of his first version, so the fact that all of this was done by sheer recollection is amazing. The amount of detail is more than most readers will need, and that is one of the great challenges of the book, along with the sometimes confusing word choice and sentence structures. But, many of the passages that recall his experiences of desert life among the Arabs are as well written as anything in the English language. Seven Pillars also gives some insight into the complex mind of Lawrence: his self loathing, insecurities, sexual oddities, hatred of his physical body, and simultaneous love and disgust with the Arab people. It is a fascinating glimpse into a mind that was struggling to understand itself and its place in the world. For those who complete the journey with Lawrence, the reward will be much more than a deeper understanding of WWI military history.If Lawrence's writing was not challenging enough, the typographical errors in the edition I read make some passages incomprehensible. BN Publishing should be ashamed to put their name on a book that has so many errors in it. From what I gather, this is an optical scan of another text, done by a computer, and published under the BN name. However, the scan was obviously not edited by a human afterwards. A common mistake by the computer optics is to read the letters "rn" in a word as "m". Instead of a scout returning to camp to "warn" the others, he comes back to "wam". You can imagine the hilarity that ensues as you attempt to read a passage several times, believing that Lawrence's vast vocabulary has gotten the better of you once again, only to finally pick out where the software made a mistake. Just this morning, I was rereading a passage from Book X that I was never able to discern. It reads "Our mobile column of airplanes, armored cars, Arab Regulars and Bedouin collected at Azrak. We determined to rot all through railways leading out of Deraa. The southern line we rot near Mafrak..." For the life of me, I don't know what "rot" means in these sentences. Unfortunately, those types of errors are common throughout the 400,000 word text. For this reason, I cannot recommend the BN Publishing version of this book. If there was a hardcover, human-edited, unabridged text I would pay a pretty penny for it, but this seems to be the only one on the market. Stear clear of the BN Publishing edition at all costs! I hope you can find a great version of this wonderful book and will treasure it as much as I do.