Customer Reviews

Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire (Discoveries)

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... that's about all that this little book has to recommend it. (I'd actually give it more like 1&1/2 stars.) The other thing is the excerpts of source material at the end. It's basically a coffee table book, complete with glossy paper, in a paperback size. The text itself can't really be recommended. "Barbaric and uncultivated race"?! (pg. 17). It obviously wasn't edited by someone who knows Mongolia -- non-standard terms and spellings for names are used throughought. Some dates are wrong (the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Chinggis Khaan's birth was in 1962, not 1955). A few passages just don't make sense. "What may have played the biggest role in favor of the Mongols despite internal or foreign wars, conclusively marginal, was the establishment of peace and order" (pg. 66). Many assertions are wrong, or at best very misleading. You get the idea. And what history is okay is really too abbreviated to be of much use to anyone who knows anything about Mongolia, and for those that don't, there are much better sources to start with, such as David Morgan's The Mongols, or Ratchnevsky's biography of Chinggis .

While I am not enamored of the writing style of the author--and I imagine the translation into English was uneven--the little book makes up for it with very nice, colorful illustrations from Mongol and central Asian art, and with a helpful set of primary source readings at the end of the book. No, it's not going to be authoritative as a history, and some phrases are awkward (though mostly just old-fashioned), if you can find it at a used bookstore, it's worth picking up, and using for the things it does well. It works best as a historical art book interspersed with history.