Conn Iggulden's Genghis: The Birth of an Empire.
http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Birth-Empire-Novel-Dynasty/dp/038534421X#reader_038534421XJust by chance I started reading this series from book #3, Bones of the Hills, at the end of which Genghis dies.
I bought it at the Borders near me which went out of business about 5 years ago.
Unlike the overblown fantastic over striving journalese or journalism--lese -- of Siege: 68 hours inside Taj Hotel Mumbai
Iggulden writes with a clean steely visceral as well as violent and visual sense of action, character and place, and manages to make us feel as if we are really Genghis father being attacked and betrayed on the Mongolian steppe. (I just read about 70 pages! of the free sample on Amazon).
In book one, the beginning, he does not relate the usual beginning, from Secret History of the Mongols--that Genghis Khan was born from the union of a wolf with a fallow deer.
Iggulden stays away from the myth with the seamy grimy harsh and brutal reality--
but in the third person limited point of view (also favored by GRRM--Game of Thrones)
he has the ability to switch from one point of view to the next, even the language changes, with complete clarity and credibility, somewhat like Dickens or Tolstoy. So why are some popular writing teachers still teaching you must not "switch heads"--Why not? I still remember how a classmate almost screamed at me--"You just switched point of view here."
*
For me, I know the main facts of the Genghis story already, from reading about it, including the scholarly work by Mark Rossabi, over the last 17 years or so.
Yet Conn Iggulden still manages to draw me in with a wealth of textural detail, without slowing down the action.
Or rather the action isn't frenetic as it is in an action movie, but with a heightened consciousness of the characters, who are after all constantly in life or death situations on an hostile environment.
I think it's all superb, and deserves to be the bestsellers they are, Conn Iggulden's books.
I have not read his Rome series.
The only Rome novel I have read being Robert Graves' horrific I, Claudius. (Again like GRR Martin's world in Song of Ice and Fire series).
So, a lot to look forward to.
BTW, if you contemplate buying a novel, always listen to the audio edition too. Genghis: Birth of a Nation is read beautifully.
In the extensive free sample, through the action/story, Iggulden weaves in how disparate the tribes were, and Tartar and Mongol are not the same, and also there was no Mongol Nation before Genghis. (Spelled "Chingiz" by Rossabi).
Iggulden does this by showing how Genghis and his elder brother Becktar suffered when they spent a year each being "broken in" with their mother's tribe when they were "waiting for their bethrothed to come into their monthly blood."
He also shows excellently how Genghis' own clan became the efficient conquering and killing military machine it became.
One was the way the arbans and the tumens were organized. I am not going to explain here what they were, look it up yourself.
Another was that the Mongol tribes, unlike say the Egyptians or the Mormons or the Burmese monarchs, knew that incest could destroy your gene pool and weaken the tribe/s.
So they practiced raids or getting brides by abduction or negotiation, or by rape and capture during war.
I am not recommending it as a marital practice, I am just pointing it out.
Jon Krakauer in his book Under the Banner of Heaven describes how many Mormon women in modern times "gave birth to blobs of blood" because incest was so common, fathers and uncles "marrying" daughters and nieces in a chilling abusive "pattern."
So I don't think all these "racial purity" or blood lines theories are any good.
Anyway, read Iggulden, you can't go wrong and you will also learn a lot of how the Mongols conquered the world between the Western borders of present-day China up to Hungary and Vienna in Europe.
And how they became the Moghuls in India.
Fascinating.
(Whichever way you look at it, Burma is a failed system and not worth expending grey matter on. The present author was born in Burma.)
KMKaung
5-30-2014
