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A review by broman
Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn
3.0
The title is a bit of a misnomer, as this is less about Genghis Khan himself than it is about the empire he created. Indeed, the great khan is "offscreen" for a sizable proportion of the action, and the book barrels on for a few hundred pages even after he's passed. It's the history of the early Mongolian empire rather than a Genghis biography--and while those two things are very similar, they are not quite the same.
This is a big book and McLynn will reward you for reading it. The problem, as some others have said, is that a lot of it is just a dispassionate list of Mongol military movements: "Subedei marched to here on this day, then Jebe to there on that day, they sacked this town and the siege took seven days, then they decided not to sack the next town because..." and so on. This tends to happen more the farther we travel from Genghis. This is justified inasmuch as it illustrates what was the Mongols' real strength, logistics. Genghis's generals could teach UPS a thing or two above moving people and things across places in little time with minimal cost. Rather than superior technology, genius, or "ferocity" (the last one very much imagined, the first two very real), many of their victories really boiled down to, "The Mongols got to where they wanted first." Industrial organization is everything.
There's plenty more of value to it. There are meaningful insights to be had about both the contigency of history (by no means is it true that a Genghis-like figure "had" to unite the steppes) and about the brutality of the Middle Ages, and of the Mongols in particular. That's to say nothing of the analysis of Mongolian religion and economics, both worthwhile and revealing. You just have to drudge through a fair bit to get to it.
This is a big book and McLynn will reward you for reading it. The problem, as some others have said, is that a lot of it is just a dispassionate list of Mongol military movements: "Subedei marched to here on this day, then Jebe to there on that day, they sacked this town and the siege took seven days, then they decided not to sack the next town because..." and so on. This tends to happen more the farther we travel from Genghis. This is justified inasmuch as it illustrates what was the Mongols' real strength, logistics. Genghis's generals could teach UPS a thing or two above moving people and things across places in little time with minimal cost. Rather than superior technology, genius, or "ferocity" (the last one very much imagined, the first two very real), many of their victories really boiled down to, "The Mongols got to where they wanted first." Industrial organization is everything.
There's plenty more of value to it. There are meaningful insights to be had about both the contigency of history (by no means is it true that a Genghis-like figure "had" to unite the steppes) and about the brutality of the Middle Ages, and of the Mongols in particular. That's to say nothing of the analysis of Mongolian religion and economics, both worthwhile and revealing. You just have to drudge through a fair bit to get to it.