After many months of oft-inturrupted reading, I finally finished up Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

I was a huge fan of Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, & Steel; it has influenced my world history and geography classes significantly (I like to have my students consider to what degree societies are bound to environmental determinism). Collapse, on the other hand, sometimes left me cold. By the end, I felt like I was taking my medicine, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop reading a book once I’m 400 pages in.

The best stretches of the book are detailed historical accounts of the collapse of ancient societies like the Maya, the Greenland Norse, and the inhabitants of Easter Island. I was totally engrossed in these sections and haunted by his accounts of their demise. However, I felt that the constructs Diamond used to analyze these collapses were usually too complex to be very insightful – a 12-part inventory here, a 9-catagory breakdown there, etc. Somewhat less interesting, but still worthwhile were sections devoted to contemporary failings in Rwanda (overpopulation leading to genocide), China (overpopulation leading to environmental crises) and Australia and Haiti (deforestation and alien species leading to near ecological collapse). In the end, the most compelling issue to me was that those societies failed to recognize the limitations of their circumstances and adjust their lifestyles and values accordingly. Diamond concludes by attempting to connect the (overly complex) lessons of these collapses and crises with the environmental and demographic issues across the planet today with varying degrees of success.

Here are some other noteworthy tidbits about and from the book:

-One of the things I appreciate about Diamond’s work is that he is an environmental and philosophical realist (unlike the insufferable true-believer, environmental idealists suckling at Al Gore’s bloated paunch). His breakdown of the environmental issues surrounding the logging, mining, and oil drilling industries was refreshing in that he understood that businesses exist in order to create a profit for their shareholders. What’s more, he didn’t write as if to do so is somehow immoral. Diamond laid out how future of the logging, mining, and fishing industries must rely on models that allow sustainable use of natural resources while maintaining or increasing business profits. These rely in large part on the mechanism of an environmentally-engaged buying public.

-Prior to their society’s collapse, the Mayas built enormous pyramids, developed a written language and some fairly sophisticated mathematics. They also predicted, with eerie accuracy, the arrival of a truly terrible disaster film in the fall of 2009. They even carved the name “Danny Glover” onto one of their human sacrifice altars.

-It was Diamond’s contention that much of the logging and oil drilling in the modern first world in the last several decades has been done responsibly (this contention has angered many of his admirers on the left) but pointed to various reasons why companies operating in the third world continue to take a short-sighted, destructive approach. Particularly facinating to me was his analysis about why the convoluted business and distribution model of the mining industry tends to prevent market pressure for responsible practices from reaching the companies. Think about it, do you have any idea where the copper in your car or cell phone came from? Do you have any reasonable way of sending a message to that supplier with your money?

-Do you remember that movie “The Postman” starring Kevin Costner, about a reluctant mail carrier in a post-apocalyptic society who brings salvation to a desperate band of refugees? Well, turns out it will soon prove to be 100% accurate, right down to Kevin Costner’s hair plugs.

-Diamond’s section on the collapse of Greenland’s Norse colony around the year 1400 after over 500 years of existence is wonderful and haunting. He paints a vivid, grim picture of Norse life in Greenland, as they did their best to transpose their European style of life onto their frozen, tenuous environment. Here’s a photo I reflected on for along time of the largest building on their colony – the Hvalsey stone church:

-The Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, unless they don’t. Either way, anthropogenic global warming is irrefutable, and every weather phenomenon of any sort proves this. On an unrelated note, this Kool-Aid is green flavored!

-There were numerous reasons for the collapse of the Norse Greenland society. One of them is the fact that they were unable or unwilling to adjust their European values and lifestyles to suit a vastly different set of circumstances. Whereas the values and hierarchy of the Catholic church and European society served them well in Scandanavia, they proved destructive on Greenland. Large areas of premium (and scarce) land, crops and resources were collected as tithes and sent back to the archbishop on the European mainland. They immediately seem to have had an antagonistic relationship with the pagan Inuit (whom the Norse referred to as “skraelings”, or wretches). Either out of a desire to separate themselves from the Inuit or to cling to their Europeanness, they did not adjust their diet to what was sustainably available (i.e. fish, seal, and walrus), and continued to graze sheep and other livestock. This grazing eventually led to catastrophic soil erosion as the vegetation was eaten away. In the end, the Inuit outlasted the Norse on Greenland, mostly thanks to the fact that their lifestyle matched their environment.

-The Norse settlement on Iceland proved far more successful than their Greenland counterparts. This was the result of Iceland’s less severe environment, the lack of an outside enemy to compete for resources, and Icelanders greater willingness to drop economic activities and values that didn’t prove tenable. Not to be discounted are the sweet, sustaining refrains of Sororicide, Iceland’s favorite Satanic black metal band.

-The mysterious collapse of the Easter Island society is another facinating section of the book. Diamond traces how the inhabitants of the island gradually deforested the entire island until their own survival was doomed. Their society was divided into warring clans led by chiefs and priests who practiced a primitive form of conspicuous consumption. The famous stone heads found on the island are one result of this gaudy competition, as enormous amounts of energy and resources were put into the carving and transportation of these heads, believed to represent an appeal to the gods to save them. Slowly but surely, as the trees were removed, their ecosystem collapsed to the point where the island was nearly uninhabitable. When they were discovered by Europeans in the 1770s, the inhabitants were a lean, miserable people relying on fish that could be caught from shoreand cannibalism to stay alive.

-In an attempt to make their unfamiliar surroundings resemble home, short-sighted British colonists actually tried and failed to introduce rabbits to Australia’s ecosystem 5 times before finally succeeding with a different breed of hare from Spain. These rabbits then proceeded to overpopulate and infest the Australian countryside and remain a menace. Australians have since attempted to exact revenge by stealthily introducing kangaroos to the British Isles, but the wretched beasts are invariably trampled to death by mobs of soccer hooligans.

This has been a Christmas break filled with shoveling, sleeplessness, and a sickly infant. Probably not my favorite, most restful week ever. On the bright side, I did have a chance to cruise through Peter Ames Carlin’s new biography, Paul McCartney: A Life.

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m a huge Beatles fan and McCartney enthusiast. Having read similar (and more authoritative) books like The Beatles by Bob Spitz and John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman, some parts of Carlin’s book were treading overly familiar territory for me. However, he does an excellent job at connecting themes in the music of McCartney and Beatles with the events of their lives and their own personalities. Throughout the text, Carlin posits that McCartney’s music is his truest, most endearing expression of self and reflects not only his unparalleled talent but his need to prove himself and to please others. It’s definitely worth a read for any Beatles fan or serious follower of pop music history inclined to dismiss McCartney’s work as trite or suburban.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the book worth sharing:

-Carlin tracks the arc of McCartney’s character from age 9 (when his mother passed away) to today. McCartney matured from a bright, good-natured kid from a poor neighborhood to the early Beatles days as the group’s most assured talent and yin to John Lennon’s yang to the supreme confidence and accomplishment of the late 60s to his years as a sort of neo-hippy family man prone to losing his musical focus from time to time. All the while, McCartney comes across as genial and ingratiating, but also self-centered and slyly self-aggrandizing in a way the unfilterable Lennon could never manage.

-McCartney wrote the song “Maybe I’m Amazed” about the experience of having a beard and being awesome. In other words, it’s about me.

-Carlin details how John Lennon served a central role in McCartney’s life to an extent surpassed only by Linda, his wife of 30 years. Lennon, McCartney’s childhood friend and collaborator, was the only person who McCartney ever viewed as a true professional peer capable of offering meaningful criticism. Carlin offers one example after another from the 70s and 80s of McCartney indignantly reacting to critics in the studio, while Lennon’s take from afar (usually via a newspaper or magazine interview) was always incredibly meaningful to him. Years later, McCartney offhandedly mentions his songs that John liked, and his friends recall him agonizing over the insults Lennon tossed his way. As McCartney himself said a day after Lennon’s death, “He was pretty rude about me sometimes, but I secretly admired him for it.”

-McCartney has long been able to ingratiate himself with journalists and promoters by affecting a genial, effortless facade and by making silver dollars magically appear from their ears and by kissing them on their special zone.

-For all his musical abilities, Paul McCartney was the primary creative force behind two of the lousiest films of the 20th century, 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour and 1984’s Give My Regards to Broad Street. They are both mind-numbingly inane, pointless exercises in hubris. On the plus side, at least they’re in color.

-In one interesting aside, Carlin throws out an analogy for the dysfunction of the Beatles by the late-60s. Lennon was the emotionally aloof, ne’er-do-well husband and father, McCartney the tidying mother blindly trying to make the best of everything, George Harrison the surly teenager, and poor Ringo Starr was the boy playing with the toy airplane in the backyard.

-Some have speculated that McCartney hired Mark David Chapman to assassinate Lennon. Because this sounds about right to me, those people are accurate. You can find more of my valid, provable ideas at www.911truth.org.

-McCartney’s relentless womanizing exploits as a young man were unsurprising (I’m shocked – SHOCKED – that the Beatles had sex with groupies!) but nonetheless pretty pathetic. He was a serial cheater, while also sure to instruct his girlfriends how to dress, wear their makeup, and behave (not unlike how he tended to direct his bandmates at times). His turnaround once he got involved with Linda is thus all the more remarkable. They were soulmates and basically inseparable for the three decades of their marriage. Admirably, they raised their kids in a stable, loving (and rich beyond imagination) family. All their kids went to neighborhood public schools and have turned out to be the sort of totally unembarrassing celebrity kids you don’t see much of.

-Putting the intelligent, but minimally musically-talented Linda McCartney in Wings was a totally reasonable decision with no downside, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

-Carlin’s passages describing Linda’s death from breast cancer in 1998 are incredibly moving. The real heartbreak, however, is following Paul’s heartbroken self-destruction blindly into a new marriage with Heather Mills, who turned out to be a lying, narcissistic bitch to the surprise of none of her ex-husbands.

-Paul McCartney is an animal-loving vegetarian, like my wife and Hitler.

-After avoiding playing many of his Beatles hits in concert, McCartney’s shows since 1989 have featured crisp performances of much of his Beatles material to the delight of his fans. In unrelated news, Paul McCartney enjoys money.

This Saturday I was able to relax and read through Rolling Stone editor David Wild’s 2008 book He Is…I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond.

Let me make this clear off the bat – this book doesn’t come close to approaching the quality of the books I usually review on this site. It’s essentially a long essay by one of the industry’s most respected music critics about his long, secret love affair with the music of Neil Diamond. It’s part biography of Diamond (albeit a lazy one, recycling old quotes from just a handful of sources) and part apologetics. My credentials as a Neil Diamond fan are well-established. I don’t feel like I have to apologize about that anymore, especially since his remarkable post-2005 career renaissance.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from this short book:

-Wild’s essential argument: Diamond has written an incredible number of moody, melodic masterpieces, and done so completely on his own terms. Who else’s career mirrors his? Even in the his schmaltzy AOR era of the late 70s and 80s, Wild argues that Diamond essentially created that market, and artists like Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, and Kenny Rogers followed. He contends (and I would agree) that the fact that he has never even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is evidence of an elitist bias against Diamond’s unparalleled popular success.

-I saw Neil Diamond in concert in 1996 with my best friend from high school. We had front row seats, and we went so ballistic during “Shilo”, our favorite song, that he pointed at us and nodded. I’m not kidding about any of this. That might be one of my top 10 favorite experiences ever, along with getting married, growing a beard, and the Vikings’ dramatic last-second win on Sunday.

-Neil Diamond puts his form-fitting, glass-beaded pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.

-Long before Wesley Snipes became America’s sweetheart, Neil Diamond regularly concluded his concerts by saying, “Thank you! Goodnight! Always bet on black!”

-Diamond’s childhood and adolescence struck me for how normal it was. After having read the eyebrow raising accounts of the childhood experiences of other entertainers like Groucho Marx, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bono, it was somewhat anticlimactic to read about Neil Diamond growing up in a loving, middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn. I kept waiting for one of his parents to get nailed by a bus.

-Neil Diamond devised his hip-wiggling, eye-bulging stage moves after watching a dog suffer an epileptic seizure.

-Though I’d hardly characterize this book as revelatory, Diamond came across in this book as a grounded, agreeable guy with an intense devotion to his work. That intensity has driven him to regularly isolate himself while chasing down his musical goals, resulting in a few broken marriages (to his credit, Wild doesn’t attempt to whitewash this). At the same time, his loyalty is on display when one takes a look at his troupe of backing musicians and collaborators, nearly all of whom have been working with him for 30+ years.

-In addition to his prolific run of hits from 1968-1972 that included “Sweet Caroline”, “Cracklin’ Rosie”, “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” and “Play Me”, Neil Diamond also served as Richard Nixon’s embattled press secretary.

-Wild makes an argument that “America” is a genuinely great, heartfelt song celebrating the immigration experience of Diamond’s grandparents and so many others. However, patriotic American that I genuinely am, I still can’t really stomach the song. It’s just so blasted ham-fisted. (TODAY!)

-Neil Diamond is old enough to be my grandfather, yet still spry enough to elude me in a footrace down a private Malibu beach path.

During pauses from becoming completely mentally and financially prepared for fatherhood, I’ve had the pleasure of breezing through Joseph Ellis’s His Excellency, a fine, modestly-sized biography of America’s great unknowable founder, George Washington.

Ellis has written a wonderful book that provides a large amount of insight into the motives and mindset of George Washington, a man whose austerity, dignity, and aloofness created an aura of authority and mystery around that has not dissipated with time. Rather than coming closer to knowing him over the subsequent years, Washington has remained as lifeless as an ivy-covered statue in our popular understanding. His Excellency is a great, eminently readable study of the personality and greatness of this remarkable man.

Here are a few highlights from the text:

-Ellis contends that Washington’s studied silence masked the fact that he wrestled with his own turbulent passions. Again and again, he to peels back layers of correspondence and to see Washington as a man determined to rise above his mammoth ambitions and ego to project a serene authority. The self-control and character he built in this fashion allowed him to serve and lead this fledgling nation out of its infancy in a way that probably no other man would have been able. Examples of his vigilant self-surrender serving as a benefit to a larger cause include his choosing to adopt a defensive posture midway through the Revolutionary War (against his own highly aggressive instincts), voluntarily surrendering all military and political authority at the conclusion of the war (for this reason, Americans should thank God that Washington was different than Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao or any other man from history placed in a similar position), and his refusal to accept a third term as president (though he would certainly have won).

-Famously, Washington had wooden teeth. Less known is the fact that he also had wooden eyes.

-George Washington is alive and living in Boca Raton, Florida according to the drunken homeless man who wandered into traffic in front of my car last night.

-Out of Washington’s internal battles arose a tough-minded political realism. He understood innately that people and nations act not out of ideals but out of interest. He was never prone to sentimentalism or clouded by utopian visions like many of his contemporaries (Jefferson, most notably). For these reasons, he harbored no illusions about the reliability of volunteer militia regiments, he welcomed France’s involvement in the Revolutionary War only warily, he was an immediate skeptic of the weak central government of the Articles of Confederation, and he scoffed at the high-minded platitudes of the French Revolution. Washington’s understanding of the evil in himself attuned him to the evil in the world. As Ellis writes, his internal struggles “inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot’s phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

-During cabinet meetings, George Washington would delight the rotund John Adams by tickling him. Sometimes Alexander Hamilton liked to join in, but he would often get too rough and the three men would have to be separated.

-Washington was not a particularly religious man. He attended church on occasion but did not take communion, and letters from him do not seem to reflect any reservoir of feeling or thought on the matter. If there was an overarching ethic to his life and attitudes, it wasn’t the Protestantism of his upbringing, but the older model of Roman stoicism – accepting of his Providential fate over and above his own desires.

-Late one night in a candlelit Philadelphia tavern, George Washington and Ben Franklin went to third base with each other. Of course, in 1700s terms, “third base” means “writing a respectful but affectionate note of correspondence.”

-On his death bed, Washington requested, “Someday, place my visage on a quarter-dollar coin, but make sure it looks like I’m not wearing a shirt.”

-One of the most fascinating themes in the book involves tracing the evolution of Washington’s thoughts on slavery (he owned over 300 slaves). Up until the Revolution, he appears to have never given the matter a second thought. During the war, the experience of commanding free black men under the banner of individual liberty awoke him from his numbness. Upon his return, he also became acutely aware of the economic problems and contradictions of slavery. He didn’t like the existence of slavery, or the fact that his hands were bloody in the mess, but true to form, he refused to allow it to become an issue of idealism or sentimentalism. He wrote to a friend of his intentions to “liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings” – yet he hesitated until he could do so in a way that made economic and pragmatic sense. That occasion did not arise until his death. His will specified that all slaves in his possession be freed, and that an education and financial support be provided to them. While we might wish for Washington to have made a more unambiguous moral statement about the question of slavery, such behavior would have been out of character for him.

-Washington was just over 6’3”, well above average for a man of his day. In fact, as a young man he briefly played power forward for the Williamsburg Continentals as a rebounding defensive specialist. He was an 18th century Mark Madsen.

If George Washington were alive today, the first thing he would say would be “let me fly a helicopter.”

I recently finished up Mark Essig’s Edison & the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death, an analysis of the convergence of technology, business, politics, and personality that led to the development of the electric chair at the tail end of the 19th century.

The book sets out to be a study of the role Thomas Edison played in this sordid spectacle, but Edison the man remains just out of reach throughout the text. The reader knows the basics of his life and Essig’s suggestions about Edison’s ulterior business intentions seem to hold water, but by the last page the reader is no closer to understanding Edison himself. Essig occasionally leads the reader on wonkish detours into the world of 19th century electrical engineering and loses the Edison thread entirely on sections devoted to the New York state government’s move toward “death by electricity” in the late 1880s.

Despite this, the book is an illuminating, at times shocking (hilarious puns intended) look at the move toward a supposedly immediate, painless method of execution. Here are a few items of note from the text:

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-Edison himself was opposed to the death penalty, believing it to be a barbaric relic of a bygone age. Why then was he involved (albeit in a sideways way) in the development of the electric chair? In part, he honestly believed that a proper electrocution would be instant, painless and thus more humane than hanging. At the same time, Edison was a ruthless businessman and saw an opportunity to cripple his biggest rival in the electrical business, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC) system had many advantages over Edison’s direct current (DC), but a noted disadvantage was the fact that AC was more dangerous. Edison was adamant that AC power be used in executions, hoping to link his rival’s product with death in the public’s mind.

-The term “electrocution” is something of a pop cultural mish-mash of a word that emerged as a public favorite over other suggestions like “electricide”, “electromort”, and “sittin’ on the brain-melter”.

-Each year, Chevy Chase electrocutes dozens of street cats hoping to remind passersby of the wacky holiday hijinks seen in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

-An untold number of stray dogs and old horses were killed in experiments measuring the voltage and electrode placement that would be appropriate to kill a human. Bizarrely, this was a matter of great fascination and amusement to the public, who still saw electricity as something of an untamed novelty. One of the earliest smash hit motion pictures in history was shot on a kinetoscope, Edison’s precursor to the film camera. This 1903 short was imaginatively titled The Electrocution of an Elephant, in which a circus elephant was electrocuted after it killed a human (watch it here). The film won eleven academy awards.

-In 1888, before a kneeling president Grover Cleveland, Thomas Edison publicly electrocuted a bald eagle, declaring, “Behold, America. I am your god now!”

-Thomas Edison was over eight feet tall.

-Essig’s accounts of the first uses of the electric chair are grim and sickening. Despite all the work and testing that went into the development of the chair, the prison warden in question had little idea what he was doing. The voltage supplied was too low and the currents weren’t applied long enough resulting in a horrific, agonizing death for the prisoners. Later electrocutions were less haphazard but often resulted in terrible burns and other disfigurements.

-In the heyday of the sensual 1970s, several Brooklyn strip clubs experimented with on-stage electric chairs, with gruesome results.

-In addition to the light bulb, recorded sound, and motion pictures, Thomas Edison invented laughter.

-Later in his life, Edison distanced himself from any involvement with the electric chair while delighting in any opportunity to talk about any other part of his incredible career as an inventor. His electrical company lost the battle of the currents with Westinghouse, and eventually merged with a third company (forming General Electric) allowing Edison himself to take a back seat in business affairs. Edison spent his last few decades as a relaxed celebrity ambassador of American innovation and industry.

-Edison liked to lick 9-volt batteries, telling reporters that he liked how the tingle made his sphincter clench up real tight. Reporters would then awkwardly look away.

Recently, while wiling away the hours in my shamechamber, I finished reading Jack Weatherford’s compelling Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World – a history of the great Mongol Empire that stretched across Asia and Europe, ruling over the China, Russia, the Muslim World, Eastern Europe, and everywhere in between for most of the 13th & 14th centuries (and beyond, in many places).

The book is an illuminating reexamination of the life of Genghis Khan and his role in shaping the modern world by connecting distant cultural zones and setting the table for Europe’s Renaissance. Using new sources unveiled since the end of the Cold War, Weatherford goes a long way toward dispelling the myth of Genghis Khan, the bloodthirsty tyrant, ignorant of higher culture and knowledgeable only in killing and herding (a misconception this blog has occasionally furthered). I’d definitely recommend this book for somebody looking for a short text with plenty of adventure and historical analysis about a subject we Westerners are woefully ignorant of.

Here are a few notable tidbits gleaned from the book:

-Genghis Khan’s personality is difficult to gauge – so much has been written about him, but so little from a sympathetic perspective. In Weatherford’s text, he comes across as highly intelligent and intuitive, loyal (particularly to the women in his life), but also somewhat aloof. Certainly he was ruthless – how could one rise from an insignificant peasant to the most powerful world leader in history without being ruthless? The story of his rise to power is simply incredible.

-Genghis Khan himself propelled the Mongol and Tartar tribes from a cycle of perpetual sparring and kidnappings to unparalleled world conquest – this cannot be explained as a matter of impersonal geographical and climatological influences, as so many modern historians are wont to do. The reasons for Genghis’s actions stem from the kidnapping of his wife and the deep-rooted need to protect and avenge himself that grew out of it. Once he set his sights on a target (usually in retaliation against mistreatment of his envoys), he was better at achieving military victory than anybody else in history.

-Before descending into battle, Genghis Khan would ritualistically smell the earth, offer a prayer to the Eternal God of the Blue Sky, and pump his Reebok Pumps twenty times each.

-Though highly adaptable warriors, the Mongol weapon of choice was the bow and arrow. When pressed, however, they also liked to kill their enemies through their second-hand smoke.

-The reasons for the Mongol military success are numerous. First of all, they had the fastest, most mobile army in the world – it was their version of the blitzkrieg. Depending solely on their horses, Mongol armies needed no supply lines. They could survive on drinking horse blood and dried milk curd for days (as could I). Their armies were superbly organized and led, and their maneuvers were centuries ahead of their time. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they meant business. The Mongols under Genghis Khan were the most efficient killers of men the world had ever seen. They scared the living crap out of the known world, and many cities quickly opened their gates to them rather than fight.

-The Mongols lived a spartan life, even as conquerors. Most continued to live in their horsehair yurts, or tents, and ate a diet of primarily meat and dairy products. Also, like simple beasts of the field, they didn’t have cable television.

-If Genghis Khan were alive today, he would use a skateboard and an aluminum baseball bat to destroy the mall in San Diemas, California, while communicating in a series of grunts.

-For all their lethal killing power, the Mongols strongly sought to avoid unnecessary mutilations or disfiguring attacks because both were powerful taboos in their culture. Their conquests didn’t involve the stacking of heads, burning victims alive, or other such grotesque displays seen in Muslim or European wars. At the same time, they weren’t playing backgammon, either. Killing was a way of life for Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Life was cheap on the steppe.

-Genghis’s grandson Khubilai Khan became famous in his own right as the conqueror of China and head of the Yuan Dynasty. He also invented sucking maple syrup straight out of the bottle.

-Not much is known of Genghis Khan’s physical appearance, but ancient Persian historians wrote that he combined the grace and power of Charlemagne with the rugged vitality of Burt Reynolds.

-Genghis Khan was a remarkably tolerant and civil administrator of his empire. He decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone under his rule. There was no historical precedent for this level of openness. Part of this was an intellectual openness and curiosity – he was interested in religious ideas and interreligious debate (Weatherford describes a lively debate between Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist priests for the Mongol leaders that devolved into drunkenness). Partly, it was a practical solution to the difficult matter of the incredible amount of religious diversity in the Mongol Empire. Lastly, it served another pragmatic purpose – when Mongol armies entered a new area, they immediately gained favor with the persecuted religious minorities they invariably came across.

-The Mongols bred their horses to be stocky and thick-haired, much like my father-in-law.

-Weatherford tracks the curious rise and fall of European opinion toward Genghis Khan throughout the centuries. In his lifetime and in the first centuries after, Europeans held him and the Mongols in quite high esteem as a result of the notably increased flow of new goods and wealth pouring in from Asia. During Europe’s Enlightenment and colonial period, however, sentiment turned sour as the prevailing narrative dictated the inherent superiority of European culture over the uncivilized peoples of Asia, Africa, and North America. Only in recent decades has Genghis Khan’s achievement been reexamined on its merits.

–The Mongols’ favorite curse insult was khorkonaag, a word that translates roughly as, “one who sniffs deep from a diseased mare’s withered anus.” A oft-used variant, knorkonaag-baatar, means “spaceship.”