Reviews
Fantástico, me dio todo lo que vine a buscar. En la medida que he podido ver mas países y realidades el nombre de Ghengis Khan me ha aparecido un par de veces y tras ver un video de uno de sus museos en Mongolia me di cuenta que poco y nada sabia de el.
Este libro relata de manera sencilla y muy bien documentada la vida de Ghenghis Khan, lo que sucedió con su imperio tras su muerte y que paso con los Mongoles en los siglos venideros. El libro describe épicas que parecen pura ficción, mas la magnitud de los Mongoles para atacar, crear y dominar el mundo antiguo es impresionante. Termine el libro pensando que los Mongols estan lejos de ser los monstruos que muchos pintan. Visionarios en todo sentido, fueron simplemente únicos e irrepetibles.
Totalmente recomendado para cualquier persona que como yo, quiere adentrarse mas en la historia de Mongolia y los Khan.
For centuries, people saw Genghis Khan as merely a blood-thirsty conquerer. Perhaps the most important reason we have seen Genghis in this light is due to his own propaganda. “Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars.” This book attempts to counter that image of the Khans and the Mongol Empire, and shows all the great things they did that lay the foundation for the modern world: religious tolerance, paper currency, a postal system, etc. The book was a little too “this happened then this happened then that happened” for me to really enjoy it, but the information it contained was fascinating.
Took me a year - but it’s phenomenal.
Nice book to listen to as background sound while doing other things. Good overview of how the mongols basically conquered everything they could reach, and in doing so imposed many values and societal structures that still survive to this day.
A different perspective on how the Mongols/Moghuls/Tatars were and what they introduced to the human civilization. They are not just the killing/fighting/bloodsheding barbarians, but more beyond that!
Weatherford provides an entertaining and informative look at the rise and impact of one of history's great military leaders that shatters much of our caricatured perceptions. By the end though it feels like the author has baptized Genghis Khan as a proto progressive who ushered in a new age of secular government and free trade, all the while downplaying the slaughter of his battlefield conquests.
My favorite book I read in 2013. Unfortunately written by a fanboi whose introduction immediately calls into question his scholarship, but provides a completely different perspective on Khan, the Mongols, and really, most of the world's civilization. Genghis Khan was way more important than you think. He had the largest land empire ever, was pretty much the only conquerer who enforced freedom of religion, oppressed the lords rather than the serfs, and consolidated engineers, architects, and philosophers, rather than just stuff. His last descendent was dethroned in 1920. Yeah, it's that different than you thought.
