The Admirable Side of Genghis Khan: A Modern Marvel Elizabeth Kenning 12th Grade

In Jack Weatherford’s book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, readers are immediately presented with a side of history not usually seen. Weatherford portrays Genghis Khan as a sympathetic, smart, brutally determined ruler who goes from an impoverished orphan to “the world’s greatest conqueror” (9). Through a plethora of evidence and real-life research, including spending several years in Mongolia where Khan lived, Weatherford successfully proves that Genghis Khan was not a monster but the usher of the modern world, changing the future through his ideas of kinship, his military prowess, and his implementation of new laws.

The first chapter of the book recounts Khan’s takeover of Bukhara and then goes back in time to his childhood. Khan is shown as a sympathetic character; Weatherford repeatedly mentions the death of his father and subsequent abandonment from the Tayichud Clan. Khan grows from these experiences and comes up with a modern idea that was novel at the time. The book says, “for Temujin, such chosen forms of fictive kinship were already proving more useful than the ties of biological kinship” (28). Khan decided to choose whom he trusted instead of basing trust off of familial ties alone. In his time, the...