Review by Booklist Review
Man posits that this engrossing book is the result of his ambition to travel to somewhere remote, and that Mongolia, China, and the Gobi Desert are such places. He maintains that secrecy is an important theme of the book: how and where Genghis Khan died, and how and where he was buried. Man chronicles the early history of Mongolia, the coming of the Mongols' conquests of China and other Asian kingdoms, and what he calls the Muslim holocaust. He cites that there were 100,000 to 150,000 soldiers, each with two or three horses . . . they could cover 100 kilometers a day, cross deserts, swim rivers, and materialize and vanish as if by magic. He says that prisoners had a triple use: as a slave labor force of specialist artisans, as soldiers in the army's nonnomadic contingents, and as cannon fodder. Genghis Khan fell seriously ill, perhaps with typhus, and died in 1227, and not much is certain about his burial site; the record is, according to the author, infuriatingly vague. --George Cohen Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Chaucer lauded Genghis Khan in his Canterbury Tales, while others have compared him to Satan (sometimes to Satan's advantage). In this lively volume, historian and travel writer Man presents parallel yet conflicting views of the imperialist and Mongolian national hero. The Great Khan unified the nomadic Mongols, destroyed obstructive empires, built the largest land empire in history, opened trade from Japan to Europe, and in general made way for the modern world. His tactics included murderous but focused terror, multicultural statesmanship, and sheer energy (DNA studies estimate that his genes are in eight percent of the men of Eurasia, overshadowing George Washington's claim to be "father of his country"). Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is a dramatic but more substantial historical account of Mongol imperialism and its global impact. Both books are solid and readable, and both rely on Paul Ratchnevsky's definitive and scholarly monograph Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy. Recommended for larger collections.-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
