Genghis Khan: Weatherford Also Khan (But Not So Much)

Genghis Khan & the Making of the Modern World
by Jack Weatherford

Although I was not entirely unaware of the impact of the Mongol conquests and Mongol rule in many different parts of the world, I found this book full of unexpected and sometimes astonishing information – a real eye-opener. Though not all of his statements are accurate, Weatherford’s errors seem to be largely about peripheral historical matters and not the main subject, which he has thoroughly researched. For some information about what he gets wrong, see this review.

I’d have given this book five stars is the man wasn’t such a bad writer. He has his moments, especially during the earliest part of the book, which deals with Genghis’s early life as an outcast on the steppe. In this section Weatherford is closest to his own speciality – which is anthropology, by the way, not history – and also, I think, to his source materials. It shows: at times the quality of writing is almost novelistic.

It doesn’t last. The Mongol explosion was, any way you look at it, high adventure, yet Weatherford makes the telling of it as dull as a fishknife. He is the kind of writer who likes to say ‘three decades’ instead of ‘thirty years’ – boring and a bit pompous. He is also clearly determined to rehabilitate the popular image of the Mongols, and is often rather credulous of pro-Mongol sources and too dismissive of opposing views. His blatant partisanship does warn the perceptive reader to proceed with caution, but proper scholarly detachment would have been much better.

I was almost tempted to dock him another star because of the utterly awful, nauseatingly sentimental ending, an account of how he, his research assistants and collaborators rode to the top of some Mongolian rock they had discovered to be associated with Genghis, conducted ‘shamanistic’ rituals and got drunk. I’m sure they found it all joyous and fulfilling and suchlike, but it was completely unnecessary and entirely out of keeping with the dignity of a work of this kind to tell us about it.

All the same, if you can stomach the blundering, pedestrian prose – and if you would like to be astonished by just what the Mongols did and what effect it had on the world – then I heartily recommend this book for its factual content.