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As Strunk and White advise in the classic guide to writing, _The Elements of Style_, "Do not overstate. When you overstate, readers will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise." I wanted to like this book, because I find Genghis Khan and his empire to be fascinating, and yet the author so completely overstates the significance of the Mongols that he loses all credibility, and pollutes an otherwise highly readable and interesting set of facts with so much fiction that it is often difficult to distinguish the two. For example, he claims in the introduction that the Mongols had founded the first unified nations of Korea and China, apparently ignorant of the fact that Korea had been unified since AD 668, and that China was first unified by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Similarly, he states on p. 237 that "[the Renaissance] was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture." Although the evidence for Greek and Roman influence on the Renaissance is overwhelming, the evidence for Mongol influence is flimsy at best. The more outsized the claim, the less evidence the author seems to provide. Furthermore, he tries to give the Mongols credit for inspiring Renaissance art, which he calls a hybrid of Eastern and Western styles; he gives the Mongols credit for disseminating Arabic and Indian mathematics (the Arabs themselves had disseminated Indian mathematics throughout the civilized world, long before the Mongols); he gives the Mongols credit for introducing the compass to the West (the compass was mentioned in Alexander Neckham's De Naturis Rerum, written in 1190, before Genghis Khan had even ventured out of Mongolia); and he gives the Mongols credit for inventing the Silk Road, which had already existed for thousands of years. What the book desperately needs are a fact-checker and responsible editor to curb the author's literary excesses. The author clearly sympathizes with the Mongols and wants to promote their case as responsible bearers of civilization. His biases are so blinding, that he frequently makes irrelevant comparisons to the worst excesses of the Catholic Inquisition to try to justify the mass slaughter of the Mongols, and even tries to deny the scale of Mongol genocides altogether, lamely asserting (p. 118), "It would be physically difficult to slaughter that many cows or pigs, which wait passively for their turn. Overall, those who were supposedly slaughtered outnumber the Mongols by ratios of up to fifty to one. The people could have merely run away, and the Mongols would not have been able to stop them." The gigantic flaw in logic is that the Mongols never faced odds of 50-to-1 at any one moment, but rather wiped out city after city in a process that took many years. His claim the the people could "have merely run away" is laughable, given his constant reminders that the Mongol cavalry were the fastest and most efficient army of the day. He could just as easily have applied the same ludicrous argument to any other historical genocide in order to deny their scale and seriousness. I still like the subject of Genghis Khan, and Weatherford has whetted my appetite: I may eventually pick up one of the other, more serious and scholarly books on the topic. However, I will never again make the mistake of reading anything written by Mr. Weatherford.