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A review by fishface
Genghis Khan: The Man Who Conquered the World by Frank McLynn
informative
slow-paced
1.0
How did the author manage to make such an interesting topic so mind numbingly boring??
So much time was wasted on minute details of movements of troops that could have been condensed, the author put massive quotations in French with no translation offered in most chapters (so who knows what all that meant), and the manner in which it was written was in turns patronising and lengthy obfuscating of events which could have been explained concisely. Also the constant references to "this researcher" or "a better author" are meaningless: the average reader (ie me) is hardly going to be able to extrapolate a specific individual from this, so just mention them by name! Another issue seems to be the author presents his own judgement and opinions as irrefutable fact in all but the last chapter (which has some small discussion of other interpretations)
Came back to reading this after a 2 year pause and let me assure you it had not improved one bit.
So much time was wasted on minute details of movements of troops that could have been condensed, the author put massive quotations in French with no translation offered in most chapters (so who knows what all that meant), and the manner in which it was written was in turns patronising and lengthy obfuscating of events which could have been explained concisely. Also the constant references to "this researcher" or "a better author" are meaningless: the average reader (ie me) is hardly going to be able to extrapolate a specific individual from this, so just mention them by name! Another issue seems to be the author presents his own judgement and opinions as irrefutable fact in all but the last chapter (which has some small discussion of other interpretations)
Came back to reading this after a 2 year pause and let me assure you it had not improved one bit.