John ManCríticas

Lots of good stuff in here and actually pretty easy to read, A bit more analysis of Marco's veracity than a straight telling of his story, which I'd have preferred.

This is a volume in the Time-Life Peoples of the Wild series, a bit dated (1982), as the series name indicates (of course, one could argue that it's their habitat that the term 'wild' refers to, and not the people themselves). However that may be, the book portrays, in detailed text and unique photographs, the lives of these forest-dwellers, in a remote corner of the Amazon forest in eastern Ecuador. The author and photographer have undertaken the heroic task of locating them, establishing communication, making friends, and actually living with them for weeks together, taking part in their forays into the forest, earing what they eat, trying to understand their lives and their prospects. This book presents a glimpse of what is in all probability a vanished world today, as these groups were the last of the Waorani that lived outside the Indian reserves where their compatriots had already been affected by modern civilization. The first-named author, John Man, is incidentally the writer who has produced a number of books on Mongolia and the Mongols; apparently his sojourn with the "jungle tribe in Ecuador" was a once-off experience, something he did not further pursue, but a spin-off on his editing the volume The Amazon in the Time-Life Wild Places series.

Excellent introduction to the history of the ninja. Very informative but so broad to occasionally be frustrating. The Nakano School was completely new to me which was interesting but admittedly I would have liked a deeper dive into the Sengoku period and even earlier.

Outstanding book. Every detail well-researched and beautifully presented.

Roundup of people from Phnom Penh was universal. Evacuating from the city with his family, the author looked around him at the crowds:
2000, Paperback, Cornell University Press
P.23-4:
"No one, it seemed, had escaped the roundup. One young man was carrying his sick father on his back. Women carried babies on their hips, the lame limped on crutches. Twice I saw patients in wheeled hospital beds being pushed along by relatives. Some people had small bundles of food or clothing, some carried a chicken or a duck slung over their shoulders, some had nothing but the clothes they wore. One little boy of seven or eight was wandering through the crowd, crying pathetically for his mother, staring up at every adult, hoping to see someone he recognized."

You could lose your belongings at any time from the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. The author had an expensive watch that he had kept hidden during their enforced exodus. His wife urged him to trade it for something useful, noting truthfully that it could be taken away from him at any time. He traded it to a fisherman for two of his fishing nets.
P.52-3:
"When, back in the pagoda, I mentioned this to my father, he told me something else that gave me pause. In the boat, going up river, an old man had made some critical remark about the Angkar. When being reprimanded, he was searched. The Khmer Rouge discovered that he was carrying dollars, pocket after pocket of them, perhaps 10,000 dollars altogether.
The young Khmer Rouge soldier had brandished the wad of notes and yelled at the old man, 'you're keeping imperialist money!'
Then, with a determined lunge, he had thrown the wad of dollars into the river. Stupefied, the passengers looked at each other. Why not keep the dollars? The young man could easily have confiscated them. Apparently, he had no idea of the meaning of foreign currency and how the Khmer Rouge could benefit from it.
How many Khmer Rouge officers across the country, I wondered, were currently repeating this ignorant and self-destructive gesture of empty defiance? Were all the Khmer Rouge simply arbitrary in their behavior, with each man interpreting orders in his own way?"

The author had worked in a government department. He ran across a friend he had worked with, who in turn introduced him to an official of the Khmer Rouge. Little by little, the author approached this official, to try to find answers to the question of why was Phnom Penh evacuated? (R3sist0rs, take note:)
P.66-7:
"...'we know that it is dangerous to leave the cities intact, inhabited. They are the centres of opposition, and contain little groups. In a city, it is difficult to track down the seeds of counter-revolution. If we do not change City life, an enemy organization can be established and conspire against us. It is truly impossible to control a city. We evacuated the city to destroy any resistance, to destroy the cradles of reactionary and mercantile capitalism. To expel the city people meant eliminating the germs of anti-Khmer Rouge resistance'.... "

Moved from one place to another, Thay's family ends up in an area that the regime named veal vong. It was in a forest, and the New People, as the city people were called, were to clear the area to make a camp. If you look up Veal Vong on Google maps, you'll see that it is a totally developed City now, where once there was just forest.
P.83:
"... For several weeks after our arrival, thousands and thousands more, All City people in their tattered City clothes, all as distressed as we had been, filed past our huts, plunging deeper into the forest, to make new Fields as we were doing. We watched them in silence, as we had been watched on our arrival. Always the same poignancy, the same drawn and mortified faces, the same tears, the same little dramas as friends and families met and parted, never to see each other again. So many people, so many wracked bodies, so many unsmiling faces. I began to wonder if we were part of some gigantic extermination program, for the decrease in rations and the increase in forced labor could only lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths. If this was purification, it was purification by the survival of the fittest."

The Khmer Rouge found many ways to get what they wanted for themselves, while starving the refugees.
P.87-9:
"As conditions worsened -- the rice ration after several weeks was dropped to one can for six people each day -- a New economic system, barter, insured survival of a sort.
It appeared that three or four miles away, there were villages occupied by Ancients [the name for villagers], as well as many other camps established by newcomers like us. We had frequent contact with both Ancients and New People, for New People, supervised by Ancients, were often sent into the forest to cut bamboo. Columns of people would stream past our hut in the morning carrying cooking pots, with small bags of food at their waists, returning in the evening laden with bamboo. Often, a casual greeting would lead on to conversation, and thus contacts and friendships developed. The Ancients received rather more rice than we did, and in addition were allowed to grow their own food. And we, the city people, had possessions -- mainly clothes, but also jewellery, watches, the occasional radio -- that were of interest to the peasants, who were willing to exchange their rice for our goods. Regular contacts with passers-by ensured that everyone knew the relative values of their goods.
Strangely, it became clear that the Khmer Rouge were also feeding rice into this black market system, and profiting from it to acquire goods for themselves and their families. Where did all this rice come from?
Eventually, the explanation got around. The amount of rice to be distributed was calculated on the basis of the census carried out on our arrival. But the only people who knew the actual number of survivors were the Khmer Rouge themselves. They simply never reported many of the dead. Rice for those who had died kept on arriving. Thus, the worse we were treated, the more deaths there were, and the more rice the Khmer Rouge had for themselves."

Many family members of the author died from starvation. The baby of the family died, and when the older boy, from the author's first marriage, was sent out to work in a distant camp, news came back to them one day that he had died as well. Now the only child left in the family was sick, and Thay anguished over what to do to try to keep his family intact. He and his wife Any, left their boy in the hospital.
When people went to the hospital, it was because they were too sick to work. But because there was no medicine and no healthcare workers, they went there to die. He made plans to escape with his wife, and made the overwhelming decision to leave their son in the hospital there. They knew that he would die but they felt they had no choice.
They decided to try to make their way through the Cardamom mountains to the West, towards the border of Thailand. But it was dangerous terrain, Especially for people who had been starved for over a year. During their trip through the forest in the mountains, he lost his wife Any.
P.196-7:
"Night began to fall. We decided to sleep right there, regaining strength for the climb down the next day. It was a good campsite -- a grassy plateau, backed by trees, with a large Boulder that offered protection. We began to prepare our meagre dinner in the glow of the setting sun. I lit a small fire with some twigs and dry wood, near the boulder, leaving Eng [the only remaining member of the group that had left the camp together] to take care of the cooking. There was little danger -- the smoke disappeared into the tall trees above us. Any and I prepared our beds.
Even as we worked, a stiff wind sprang up, scattering a few Sparks from the fire. I told eng to be careful, to cover it with damp leaves so that the villagers didn't notice any sudden blaze. After eng had finished cooking, she broke the fire apart with a branch and we gulped down our rice soup.
We were about to lay down, when I suddenly saw flames licking at the dry grass around the fire."
They had to run for their lives, unable to beat out the fire. When they had gone a small distance, Thay's wife realized she had left their cooking pot behind. She ran back. Thay and Eng stayed there waiting for her to come back. But she never showed up, so Thay turned back in the direction she had gone. He got lost. Moreover, when he finally gave up looking for his wife, he couldn't find Eng. Now he was on his own.

I don't really believe in karma, and I know that a starving refugee had to eat food where he found it. But when Thay found a mountain tortoise, and turned it upside down to cook it in its own shell, I found that very cruel. He didn't say whether he smashed its head first, to keep it from feeling the agony of burning to death. Thay gets his fill, and stuffs leftover meat in his pockets.
P.202-3:
"The next day I left at dawn, intending to stop at noon in order not to lose my sense of direction. But the smell of the grilled meat so whetted my appetite that I stopped early, near a stream to refresh myself and to eat a little. I stretched out beside the stream, took my bag from my shoulder and pulled out a piece of tortoise to chew. After a brief rest, I drank some water and continued on my way.
All at once I felt better than usual. I seemed to be walking faster. I was surprised, and pleased that I was moving on towards Thailand so quickly. I had covered several hundred yards at this brisk Pace when I had a strange feeling, a sort of inexplicable uneasiness. The Ease with which I was walking was not normal. I thought for a few moments the tortoise meat must have given me exceptional strength. I climbed quite a steep slope, at a good pace, without even panting.
Then came a sudden appalled realization: I had left my bag beside the stream. I was not in the habit of taking it off for a short rest, and simply hadn't thought of it.
Well, it wasn't a catastrophe. I turned back to retrieve it. The stream was only about 300 yards away. I retraced my steps.
At least, I thought I did. I thought I recognized the way. I even found a stream and walked along it. But it was the wrong stream. I couldn't find the place where I had stopped. At countless turns, at countless large trees, and endless little ups and downs, I thought I knew where I was. Time and again, my intuition proved itself wrong. It seemed nightmarish, incredible, that I was incapable of retracing a path of 300 yards. But after 3 hours, I had to admit the bag was lost.
With it, I had lost my rice, my spare clothing, my can, and the bag itself which was useful as a pillow. Now I was stripped of almost everything."

Thay almost dies, and gets captured, before he reaches the border of thailand. But he does make it. His story is important, because he recounted the treatment under the Khmer Rouge to the world.
In his country, a renegade government sought to complete genocide against its own people. But they rushed it, so that in just over a year at least 1/3 of the population of Cambodia died of starvation and sickness.
Our own 3lite are doing this to us, but at a very slow pace. It began with The loss of our j0bs, making it so that we must fight each 0ther for sh1tty j0bs and thus, l0wer w4ges, and the crappy w4ges we receive allow us only to buy the che4p3st, most unhealthy f00d, was planned, turning us into f4t, s1ck people, who will need much he41thc4re that we cannot aff0rd, thus t4king all our m0n3y on the way to our d34ths.
So we have a constitution. So this is the way they do it, p4ced out over 80 to 100 years. So that the 3l1te can keep all the m0ney, all the r3s0urces that are left, for themselves.

Let me be frank, John Man is an exceptional story-teller. His narrative possesses a fluidity which makes his words comprehensible while also ensuring that the reader cannot wait to devour more of his pages. What John Man, however, is not is a historian irrespective of his credentials. The reality is that only a very few writers are able to operate as historians and vice versa. Man is not one of them.

He commences from a post-modernist view that one must emphatically deconstruct one perspective of Saladin to up the other-that the man was an unblemished hero while alive. What he presents is the 'evil crusader' versus 'perfect Mujhaideen' dichotomy. While this might not be a great fault given that Man is, after all, human it underscores his next fault: other than a narration his book offers us nothing more. It overplays few instances of Saladin's generosity but never effectively analyzes the how and why behind them. More parochially, it fixates itself on a few figures while failing to consider contemporary economic/geopolitical factors pervading both Europe and the Middle East.

Overall, this book might act as a good introduction to Saladin as a historical personality but should not be accepted as a genuine picture of a complex personality who played a critical role in shaping the world as we know it today. There is just too much lack of detail.

Continent-by-continent guide to the world's most spectacular sights, both physical and man-made

First thing first, I don't think this book is for people completely unaware about Mongol history and the impact that they had over the present world as we know it.
I started this book as a complete noob in this area and it disappointed me to a great extent. The book is extremely haphazard in its subject matter in the initial few chapters. It seems as if the writer wants to tell everything about that incident in just a few lines (the past history of the incident, the present and how this incident will impact the future), and this makes the entire thing feel very rushed and confusing.However, as you continue (with a lot of patience) , you will get used to this style of writing. Whether this thing is because the research in this area is incomplete or unstructured or the writer wants to include everything at one go, I will never know.
However, at the same time ,you cannot say this book does not do justice to the Mongol history. It is unbiased and also has a few dedicated chapters on the present political scenario, which I think is really important to give us , readers , a perspective about the way of things.
I will advice people to pick up a different book in this subject matter. But you can also go for this book ,you won't be disappointed , just that you may have a bit of difficulty in the initial phases.

A bit of drama and lots of kink.

Wow. Really good.

A good and fun kinky read.

Excellent, highly readable history of the Mongols. Focuses on Genghis through Kublai, mentions the outliers and notable descendents, then skips to the modern era.½

File under something is better than nothing, as the author tries to pull together what is known about the Xiongnu, the first great nomadic adversaries of the Chinese state, and the possible ultimate ancestors of the Huns. My basic problem is that, at a certain point, Man feels like he's piling up anecdotes from the Chinese historical classics of varying degrees of relevance to fill pages. However, Man at least knows where he wants to get to, and has historical problems that he's examining, which is a plus over some of the narrative histories I've read of late.

Author John Man takes us from the youth of Temujin, and how he became Genghis Khan and built an empire that crossed Asia into Europe, to his descendants - not just Ogedai and Kublai, but all the branches of his family, taking us into the internecine feuds and jostling for power while the empire Genghis has founded doubled in size, and then caused it to fracture and split.


He does a wonderful job of following the often tortuous paths of history with clarity, but also setting them in the context and feel of time and place; the attitudes of the lands and nations who faced the Mongols, well-argued reasons for why they fell or resisted. The canvas is vast, and he introduced me to many aspects of this history of which I was entirely unaware: the facts that the Turks were a earlier wave of settlers from the same part of the world, the Mongol conquest of the entirety of Asian Islam, the fact that European Christian crusaders allied with the Mongols on more than one occasion ( from a belief that they represented the mythical Eastern Christian emperor Prester John to simple practicality of fighting the same opponent ), the failed invasions of Vietnam and Japan, the off-hand remark that modern Pakistan was part of the empire. Each of these and more could fill volumes in their own right, and I hope I can find accounts written as well as this.


Not that this book is simply a brief overview, Man goes into detail that is substantial and in depth, but not overwhelming. Early on I had been perhaps a little disparaging of his narrative style, but that was entirely unfair; while quite different from the style of, say, Tom Holland, one of my personal favourites and a consummate writer of narrative histories. While initially it seems that Man is rushing through events and piling up detail, he circles back and suddenly he is building a narrative picture that has drawn the reader right into the heart of the story. His main achievement, though, is the way he connects the events to modern history, not only the China ( including how the Chinese claim Genghis for their own ) but Russia, the 'Stans, the Middle East and even how it moulded medieval Japan.


I do have to say that one problem with the book is the way he deals - or doesn't deal - with rape. This becomes especially apparent in a later section when he revisits the fact that one of Genghis' sons was viewed ( possibly correctly ) as illegitimate as his mother had been held captive by an enemy tribe for several months, as well as the fact of Y-chromosomes originating in Mongolia being widespread throughout Asia and Europe. He states these matters as simply that, without acknowledging the sexual violence implicit in both. I'm sure the author would say something along the lines of "it was a simple fact of how the world was then", but he doesn't say anything in the text and this omission, whether he feels it irrelevant, or is uncomfortable with the subject, leaves for me a troublesome gap that should at least have been recognised.

Adda to perspective and understanding...

Interesting, well written account of the invention of the printing press.

The name of Attila the Hun still resonates in western culture as "The Scourge of God" and the embodiment of barbaric mayhem. Reliable source material on Attila is scanty. His posthumous reputation was created by Christian hagiographers who magnified his accomplishments with tales of virgins, saints, and martyrs. The reality is that he was an ambitious leader who raided a vast range of territory including Syria, Thrace, the Loire valley, northern Italy, and as far north as the Baltic Sea. He held only a portion and his empire dissolved upon his death.

John Man does a good job outlining Attila's biography, fleshing out his book with chapters on the Hun's probably beginnings as the Xiongnu people in Mongolia, the rediscovery of rapid mounted archery by Lajos Kassai, the turmoil of the late western Roman empire, and finally a fascinating chapter on Attila's afterlife in Medieval literature. It's a mix of travelogue and history, with some imaginative reconstructions of life in Attila's court that would embarrass a university historian but make for an enjoyable book.

This is the history of the development of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, and it’s an interesting one, too.

I was expecting something different – maybe more a roll call of each letter, going into its development. Instead, it was more academic, and more enlightening than I had expected.

The book also concerns itself partly with the origins of written language, the move from pictographs to syllables to letters.

And about English, where the letters came from (Etruscans, we think) and where it went from there. He also takes a side trip into what he considers the perfect alphabet, Korean.

This is a short book but lots of fun, and makes me want to read more about the development of the alphabet. Anybody know a good book?

For more of my book reviews, go to Ralphsbooks.

This non-fiction work about who the Amazons actually were sadly just didn't work for me. The writing is perfectly approachable but I had issues with the lack of qualifications Man used around descriptions of the history of "Amazons" from Herodotus. I was expecting more anthropology and archaeology and while the book might get there eventually, it lost me to disinterest in its first few chapters. Also, no in-text sourcing for the history offered of these women which makes it difficult to determine its reliability. May work better for other readers.½

Very good, enplanes much about the middle east and thoughts of the crusades. What it means to lead well, both good and bad.

This book gave me fits. I bought it because Attila is a minor character in a couple of my books set in 5C Imperial Rome and I wanted more information on his background--just for my personal education. The author has a degree in history and has written several other "narrative histories" which I take as writing for a general audience (very few footnotes and more conversational style). In that he succeeded. However he made lots of minor mistakes in his Roman history. Easily checked things such reversing the birth order of Empress Placidia's children (actually daughter Honoria the oldest, son Theodosius second), General Aetius led regular Roman troops in his rebellion (Mann said it was the Huns), and several others. If he got so many Roman facts wrong, how accurate was he with the Hunnish history? I don't know and that's what troubles me. I would have given this book a single star, but it was written for a general audience and such small things as birth order wouldn't detract from a normal reader's enjoyment of the book, but researchers should look elsewhere.

Outstanding!

Xanadu by John Man is a highly speculative, popular science book about the location of the great Kublai Kahn's capital, and it's relative position to Beijing, the capital of China. The book offers a DIY guide to reconstructing the fabled "stately dome" as echoed in the great poem by Samuel Coleridge. The book relies heavily of the writings of Marco Polo as a source, and tries to verify these as a possible source.

The book is written in a racy style, showering a rain of interesting snippets of information, picked up from interviewing locals about the ancient history of the area around Beijing.

To be read as entertainment.½

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

This book declares right in its subtitle that it's about the journey Marco Polo took from Italy to China back in the Medieval Age, becoming essentially the very first white person in history to give a written account to Europeans of the Far East, but that turns out to be not quite true; only half of this relatively slim book is about that, with the entire second half being a detailed archeological and anthropological guide to emperor Kublai Khan, his summer imperial city Xanadu, and other such details about ancient China that don't really have much to do with Polo or his journey at all. As such, then, although the book itself is certainly well-done, it's still getting some points knocked off today, merely because of false advertising; for I wanted to know a lot more about Polo and his journey itself, the whole reason I picked up this book, while the account given here is not much more than an extra-long Wikipedia entry, a disappointing realization for a book that promotes itself as a 350-page guide to the actual trip. Buyer beware.

Out of 10: 8.0

UPDATE: After a visit to Wikipedia, I've come to learn that Man himself originally titled this book Xanadu, giving a much clearer indication of its contents; but that when HarperCollins acquired it, they were the ones who changed it to Marco Polo: The Journey That Changed the World, so that they could release it at the same time as the Marco Polo Netflix series and pick up some cheap publicity. Shame on you, HarperCollins.

I was at first disturbed with historical errors in the book. The author advances a grandson of Noah, a son of Japheth to full sonhood and equates him to Shem. Then I discovered worse problems than historical errors. Pagination is messed up and sections are missing. Page 121 follows page 56. Page 89 follows page 152, Page 121 (again) follows page 120. Page 152 (again) follows page 151. Net loss: pages 57 to 88.