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A review by dane_rodriguez
Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn
3.0
Not a bad read for someone with a passing interest who will probably never read anything else about the Mongols and Genghis Khan.
A lot of other reviews mention the shortcomings, and many of them are valid, but to get the exact angle you want or every aspect you’d need to read several different authors. I fully disagree the author wasn’t transparent about the competing perspectives on most points of contention and treated the subject very fairly. The author had a better eye for nuance than most and did not give in too much to sensationalism.
I do agree it was a slog at times. The author even seems to betray his original theme of avoiding “one damned battle after another” with pages and pages of this city surrendered and was slaughtered or this city held out for two weeks and on and on. We could have done without a lot of that and pursued richer material, which the author seems to have wanted to on several points but for some reason held back from. I really liked his asides and contextual framing even though some went on too long and didn’t seem very relevant (my favorite kind of relevancy, sometimes) or, worse, ended too soon with huge questions unanswered. That’s fine, just new avenues of interest opened and more books to add to the ever growing backlog.
My biggest gripe is the authors interest seems to wax and wane throughout the project. The result is a bit of inconsistency, great energy and promise at the onset, the long slog of rote information, and then a rush to the finish. Who he chose to focus on times seemed like it was motivated out of some personal interest or maybe just the sources were better. It would have been worth more to his initial stated goal to cut content and touch more on how the empire fell apart, who filled the vacuum, and how that played out to the modern day. Instead we just leave it as there were four major khanates therefore the story was over for the mongols. One of those Khanates ruled China and the other was literally called the Golden Horde, so we had more to talk about, I think.
To top off the complement sandwich, the author did a great job talking about the cultural, social, and political aspects that made this episode in history seem almost inevitable. I came to this book trying to understand how a bunch of pastoralists conquered China and half the rest of the world and who the man that took the reins on this was. It really was just the exact right (and phenomenally lucky) person at the exact right place and exact right time. The end result was what we got, a short lived and seemingly random episode that will forever have altered all of human history.
Long story short, I learned a ton but wish I’d skipped some pages.
A lot of other reviews mention the shortcomings, and many of them are valid, but to get the exact angle you want or every aspect you’d need to read several different authors. I fully disagree the author wasn’t transparent about the competing perspectives on most points of contention and treated the subject very fairly. The author had a better eye for nuance than most and did not give in too much to sensationalism.
I do agree it was a slog at times. The author even seems to betray his original theme of avoiding “one damned battle after another” with pages and pages of this city surrendered and was slaughtered or this city held out for two weeks and on and on. We could have done without a lot of that and pursued richer material, which the author seems to have wanted to on several points but for some reason held back from. I really liked his asides and contextual framing even though some went on too long and didn’t seem very relevant (my favorite kind of relevancy, sometimes) or, worse, ended too soon with huge questions unanswered. That’s fine, just new avenues of interest opened and more books to add to the ever growing backlog.
My biggest gripe is the authors interest seems to wax and wane throughout the project. The result is a bit of inconsistency, great energy and promise at the onset, the long slog of rote information, and then a rush to the finish. Who he chose to focus on times seemed like it was motivated out of some personal interest or maybe just the sources were better. It would have been worth more to his initial stated goal to cut content and touch more on how the empire fell apart, who filled the vacuum, and how that played out to the modern day. Instead we just leave it as there were four major khanates therefore the story was over for the mongols. One of those Khanates ruled China and the other was literally called the Golden Horde, so we had more to talk about, I think.
To top off the complement sandwich, the author did a great job talking about the cultural, social, and political aspects that made this episode in history seem almost inevitable. I came to this book trying to understand how a bunch of pastoralists conquered China and half the rest of the world and who the man that took the reins on this was. It really was just the exact right (and phenomenally lucky) person at the exact right place and exact right time. The end result was what we got, a short lived and seemingly random episode that will forever have altered all of human history.
Long story short, I learned a ton but wish I’d skipped some pages.