Holmboe has long weighed on my mind in my own travels across Libya over the past decade, at times even retracing his journey. It was only on a trip this summer, though, that I finally packed Desert Encounter in my bag, dipping into its pages during languid afternoons in Tripoli and at night on the front lines during lulls in the fighting between militia groups. A blend of travelogue, spiritual musing, social critique, and journalistic exposé, Desert Encounter eschews the operatic prose and Homeric pretensions of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Holmboe’s account of his Libyan adventure made him one of the few Western witnesses to the savagery of the Italian colonial regime’s counter-insurgency campaign, and it became a bestseller in the United States and in Europe. Reviewing the book in November 1936, George Orwell wrote: “Mussolini’s large body of English worshippers would do well to have a look at it.”
