Genghis Khan and the Making of the Moder

Loved this book, Accurate information about Mongol empire and Genghis Khan

Very well written history of a lesser know time in history. Valuable lessons even for today.

Good. Really like it. Well written. Recommended.

Great book to understand stand Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan as well as their impact on the world

The level of storytelling is off the charts! Amazing insights.

This book about Genghis Khan is a well-researched book. It is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 is about Genghis Khan's rise to power. This part tells how he became "The Genghis Khan" from an ordinary boy who was a slave for some time and was living an impoverished life. Part 2 is about the Mongol world war which lasted about 5 decades. And part3 is about what effects of the Genghis Khan's conquest had on the wold. All in all, it is a great read to know everything about Genghis Khan.

Read the history of Mongols for first time,so cannot compare this book with any other on the same subject. Nevertheless this book has covered the evolution ,rise and fall of Mongols substantially covering pretty much every single prominent events of Mongols. Book helps us understand deeply about Genghis Khan.It helps us understand that Genghis Khan was more than a steppe hearder and that he was a genius and a man with astute sense of statesmanship .Book also makes it clear that Genghis Khan along with his Mongol hordes were not uncivilized barbarians but a grp of ppl who did everything with a specific purpose. The military prowess and warfare strategy was just awesome and how Genghis got allegiance from his men. Their secular attitude is surprising since all the contemporary rulers were ruling with religion card,hence the assimilation Mongols brought about in their empire is noteworthy. And the final art of creating a metropolis in China by Khublai Khan showed the excellence of Mongol rule. Also how Mongols touched upon every aspect of contemporary developments and finally was the catalyst for European Renaissance,age of exploration and finally Industrial Revolution. All in all a must read book. Go for it.

This is one of those seldom masterpieces that feed the reader’s longing to not only read the text but experience the literary work itself. This book is actual history written in such a lucid manner as if an adventure novel, the reading is so comprehensive and yet so light. You can read it as a historian, or as a story or as a casual read. And it story itself is so incredible that it seems to be fiction. Brilliant work.

This is an enlightening book. Even though I like to consider myself knowledgeable about history, good historical literature routinely reminds me that I'm not really. Like most of us, I've allowed certain of my views to be shaped by stereotypes laid down in school and reinforced over the years by movies and other forms of popular entertainment. Judging from the story told in Professor Weatherford's book, perhaps no historical phenomenon has suffered from such degradation more than the Mongol Empire and the life of its founder Genghis Khan. I picked the book up because I had been searching for a biography of the famous conqueror. However, with only one primary source in existence giving any inside information about his origins, it quickly dawned on me that a comprehensive life story was neither available nor feasible. So I settled on this relatively short book, hoping to glean what I could. Weatherford recounts the standard fragmentary bio about as well as anyone might, but he alludes to the real purpose of his book in its subtitle. Genghis Kahn lived towards the end of what Westerners refer to as the Middle Ages. Weatherford suggests to us that this is no mere historical coincidence, and that Genghis Kahn and his descendents were key transitional figures who helped eradicate the parochial traditions of pre-modern society and lay the groundwork for our contemporary era. Despite the limitations in our knowledge of Genghis Kahn's early life, we know much more about what came later, for the simple reason that he overran so much of the world that he eventually forced his way into the attention of numerous chroniclers. Few of them had much good to say about him, but they did round out the history of his accomplishments. Stereotypes are rarely completely off-base, and the book does not minimize Genghis Kahn's penchant for unspeakable violence. Nazi militarists would later credit his cavalry tactics as the inspiration for their Blitzkrieg tank warfare that was to crush much of Europe seven centuries later. In the few short decades of his life, Genghis Kahn hammered together the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, and he did it through the cold-blooded application of military power. However, what the popular picture leaves out is much about his motives and his methods, or the constructive side of his legacy. For it seems that Genghis Kahn was first and foremost a man of business. Far from being an end in itself for him, conquest was the means initially of acquiring the tribute necessary to finance the early expansion of his empire. Later, it gave him the range and leverage he needed to open up the world's trade routes, both among various regions of the Eastern world and, ultimately, between East and West. It was with this achievement that we see the real focus of his life and his contribution to our modern world. Genghis Kahn can be viewed as an early proponent of what we today have come to call "globalization". He understood both the military and economic power of technology, and he was adept at integrating the unique skills and resources of his subject peoples into his expanding realm. In this respect his empire was a progenitor of our modern multinational organizations. For all his military ferocity, Genghis Kahn was a surprisingly enlightened politician. He crushed opposing armies without mercy, but he protected and even nurtured civilian populations so long as they pledged loyalty and had useful knowledge and skills to contribute. He respected religion and, at a time when Christians were imposing a kind of religious totalitarianism over much of Europe, he was enforcing the freedom of worship within the regions he controlled. He established a pragmatic legal code and outlawed the more egregious forms of torture that were common in his day. He was meritocrat who accepted into his inner circle not only Mongol animists like himself, but Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and anyone else deemed to have talents helpful in administering an empire of such unprecedented size and complexity. He viewed entrenched aristocracies as impediments to his work, and he routinely dismantled them in favor of new power structures more amenable to economic development. If the tales of his youth are to be believed, he enjoyed an intense albeit turbulent romance with his wife, and they remained loyal to one another throughout their lives. Author Jack Weatherford seems like an interesting fellow in his own right. He's an anthropology professor at a Midwestern college, but is no armchair academic. Apparently having a streak of Indiana Jones in him, Weatherford spent a great deal of time roaming the modern-day Mongolian steppes in an effort to overcome the dearth of primary sources for this study and to get closer to the spirit of his protagonist. His obvious affinity for Mongol culture imbues his writing with authenticity and a poetic quality that makes it a joy to read. This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

Per approfondire un tempo, un mondo davvero poco studiati

Must read if you want to learn about the nomadic life

it arrived fast, i gifted it.

If you are just beginning to research the Mongol Empire, this is an excellent book to begin with. Also if you are just looking for a brief overview, this book would also be fit for purpose. This is and easy read without weighty voluminous detail and does not pretend to be a textbook, but a short informative introduction. The serious study of Mongol history has been hampered by centuries of secrecy by both the custodian, the Qing Dynasty and the repressive Soviet Union. The translation of the Secret History of the Mongols was first begun in the early 1980's by an Australian/Italian historian of noble Tatar (Mongol) descent, Igor de Rachewiltz. The torch was taken up by others following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the freedom of Soviet controlled Mongolia. However, the over a million Mongols remain under the repressive hand of China in an area of about half of the Mongolian Republic, called Inner Mongolia on the the republic's southern border. In full disclosure, in 1984, as an undergraduate, I wrote and extensive research paper titled, "The Sino-Mongolian Impact on Europe." The impact of the Mongols on world history cannot be underestimated. In the late Medieval Era, the Mongols created a superhighway into Europe that led to an explosion of knowledge and technological advancement. All the brilliance of science and technology in the Orient, particularly China, streamed into Europe leading to the Medieval evolving into the Renaissance and eventually the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions. At the point of first contact in the mid-Thirteenth Century Europe was a millennium behind Asia in technology, art and science. Within less than two hundred years that gap had been closed and the sky was not even the limit. Rather than the blood thirsty and cruel invaders that later ignorant people portrayed them to be, they were brilliant administrators and free thinkers ended religious wars and banditry. In so doing, they intentionally and deliberately facilitated the free flow of trade and ideas from Asia to Europe. It was the restriction of this trade by the rising Ottoman Empire that led to the Age of Discovery. Europeans seeking direct access to China and India drove the creation of the modern world. For further reading, have a look at the work begun by Professor Joseph Needham of Cambridge, Science and Civilisation in China that is an ongoing work of 7 volumes in a current set 27 books. While the prosperity of the modern world has allowed space for new nihilistic and destructive voices decrying this advance, they, themselves, would not exist, nor be able to communicate with the books, technology and free trade were it not for the Mongol Empire.