For the first two
thirds of this book, the author provides a perfectly readable history of the
origins of Genghis Khan and his immediate two ancestors. The source material is
difficult and the author does a good job of picking through what is available to
provide as good an account as any of Genghis and the Mongol Empire's
foundation.
Unfortunately this
promising start dissolves into a strange brand of Gonzo history where the
author puts themselves at the centre of the action to the point where it starts
to feel more like a travel guide written by a third rate Indiana Jones than a
serious history. What makes this worse is that the alleged discoveries the
author makes are mind blowingly mundane: I went to a place, nothing happened,
but something might have happened at some point, we don't know. Great. We could
have quite happily skipped all of this.
Unfortunately for the author that would have meant writing about Mongol
history post Kublai Khan which seems to have been omitted because it was too
complicated.
This omission
seriously undermines the claims of the title to be a book about Genghis' heirs.
There is no mention here of the succeeding khanates some of which lasted until
1920, very little on the Mughals, and nothing at all on Tamerlaine. The result
is the book drifts to the end on the back of vaguely interesting travel
anecdotes when there so much more Mongol history to tell.
If you want a
history of the first three Mongol Emperors then the first two thirds of this
book will meet your requirements, if you want a wider history look elsewhere.
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