Publisher : Brilliance Audio on CD Unabridged
Publication Date : 2010 04 06
>> The remake of King Khan
I ve read a few books on Genghis Khan and all of them had their focus on the military achievements of the Mongols their savagery and ferocity It was about the Mongol cavalry their accurate archers with special bows the ruthless warriors whose body armour covered only their front tactics of feigning retreat blitzkriegs and details of their brutality Reading some of these books it s pretty obvious that unlike Alexander Genghis Khan didn t invest in a good PR machine the only objective of his PR machine seems to have been to spread macabre stories stories of their own savagery and scare the opponents to submission This book is a bit different In addition to what we normally hear it also shows the positive side of the Mongol conquests supposedly gleaned by the author after extensive research in Mongolia and elsewhere We hear about the opening up of trade routes movement of skilled individuals across the empire thereby spreading knowledge religious tolerance position based on skills and not nepotism sound organizational skills and more The author even talks about how the Renaissance was influenced by King Khan s conquests All of this might be true and some good must have come of the Mongol conquests at least inadvertently However given that there are very few surviving historical records the Mongols didn t have a written language one gets the feeling that all this debate about Good vs Bad of Mongol deeds are pretty much speculations The books is well written and the explanation style is captivating
>> Kahn Polemic
The first part of the book was a good read It covered the life of Genghis Kahn sufficiently to get the sense of the man as a human being rather than the monster history has often shown him to be
However the last part of the book seems to step out of the history telling mode and into what seemed to me to be a quite biased view of the legacy of Kahn
To me the last part of the book maybe the last 1/3 was a waste of time It made one doubt the honest scholarship in the preceding 2/3 of the book Thus to get the full picture of Genghis Kahn one has to look farther afield than this book only If this is the only book you read about Genghis Kahn you will have an incomplete idea of who he was and the impact he had on history
>> Great read
It would be very foolish and unwise to not read this book if your a history lover
The author s writes very fluid and concise and easy to follow This book really help broaden my understanding of the middle ages and how the Mongolian empire operated
I never knew the Mongols were the key catalyst in linking the separate middle age kingdoms of the world into the modern world
Mongols never created or invented anything What they did do was link the worlds of Asia Europe and Muslim into a global integrated world Mongols took the best of each civilization and passed it to the next The Europe region was the most poor and backwards and benefited the most The Muslim world was the most advanced and wealthy and suffered the worse Mongolian wreckage
While Genghis was not a saint he pioneered a new world order that would form the modern global world Mongols pioneered free trade and international commerce Really the first empire to do this since the Romans
Mongols were the greatest warriors of the middle ages They made the heavy slow armored knights of Europe absolute They perfected Chinese siege technology to the highest levels Mongols crushed any resistance from the slow European armies to Muslims to the Chinese without any trouble
In the end like most empires the Mongolian world suffered a fragmented world where sons of previous Khans could never co exist or get along The empire became weaker and more fragmented Finally the Black Death of the 14th Century put in end to most of the great empire
Don t want to give out all the great details Just get the book I finished it in a week it was that good and i read slow
