After seeing it mentioned on Gene Expression a few times, I decided to pick up Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford.#

I found it to be very interesting and informative -- with details that I had never heard before. However, there is a clear bias in the book that continually annoyed me, as well as a few other quirks.#

Basically, the author idolizes Genghis Khan, or maybe incredibly dislikes Europeans. Whenever the author would like to put down European government, he gives the impression that the Khans were great liberators and very "progressive" in their policies. But, in other instances he writes about how brilliantly cruel they were in battle or how efficient they made this or that means of controlling peoples lives through the centralizing power of the state they created. This happens particularly often in the later chapters that describe the empires of Genghis' heirs.#

There are other quirky things about this book that get on my nerve. For example, the author uses names for times and events that are purposely used to subvert traditional understanding of history to paint the Mongols as some great icon of modernity that the intelligentsia have tried to obscure. These are things such as "The First Mongol World War" for Genghis' first campaign; and "The Global Awakening" from 1262 AD to 1962 AD when all of the world, especially Europe, realized that everything good came from the Mongols.#

Overall the book was good, but I had to constantly keep myself from throwing up at the idolizing and fawning over the glory of murderers and tyrants. History isn't pretty, but that doesn't mean historians should pretend it is.#