Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 950.2092
EAN num: 9780306814655
ISBN number: 030681465X
Label: Da Capo Press
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: February 27, 2006
Publishing house: Da Capo Press
Sale Popularity Level: 290958
Studio: Da Capo Press
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Product Description:
Tamerlane, aka Temur-the Mongol successor to Genghis Khan-ranks with Alexander the Great as one of the world's great conquerors, yet the details of his life are scarcely known in the West. Born in obscurity and poverty, he rose to become a fierce tribal leader, and with that his dominion and power grew with astonishing speed. He blazed through Asia, razing cities to the ground. He tortured conquered inhabitants without mercy, sometimes ordering them buried alive, at other times decapitating them. Over the ruins of conquered Baghdad, Tamerlane had his soldiers erect a pyramid of 90,000 enemy heads. As he and his armies swept through Central Asia, sacking, and then rebuilding cities, Tamerlane gradually imposed an iron rule and a refined culture over a vast territory-from the steppes of Asia to the Syrian coastline. Justin Marozzi traveled in the footsteps of this fearsome emperor of Samarkand (modern-day Uzbekistan) to write this book, which is part history, part travelogue. He carefully follows the path of this infamous and enigmatic conqueror, recounting the history and the story of this cruel, cultivated, and indomitable warrior.
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Rated by buyers 
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Just finished Marozzi's book. I can see why some people grew annoyed...its not arranged like a typical history title. But I liked it for that reason. Marozzi's writing is solid too, and the book breezed by. When I finished I was actually a little sad!
Marozzi definitely seemed to be in awe of Tamerlane, and his enthusiasm in turn made me excited for each new chapter. While most of Tamerlane's historic career was quite bloody and brutal, I couldn't help but be enthralled by it. I also couldn't help but be fascinated by Tamerlane's cultural combination of Muslim and Mongol traditions...really interesting reading.
If you like your history on the straight and narrow with little or no author commentary, then you won't like this book. But if you're willing to go off the beaten path a little and read some personal travel musings sprinkled in with the main story, you will enjoy Marozzi's efforts here.
Rated by buyers 
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If you're looking for a detailed, clear narrative of Tamerlane's life and achievements, Justin Marozzi's book is not it. Failing to develop Tamerlane as an individual from his youth onward, and failing to explain exactly how he came to be so successful, Marozzi diverts perhaps half the book to recounting his own travels in Tamerlane's homeland. As descriptive and rare the author's experiences may be, a journalistic description of former metropolises in modern-day Central Asia does not provide a better understanding of the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. Throughout the book, Marozzi views Tamerlane more through the distant lens of someone in awe of his achievements, rather than the skeptical and down-to-earth approach necessary for biographers to truly evaluate who their particular subject really was.
This is the flow of the book: a few very narrowed down pieces of Tamerlane's life, each separated by an equally large amount of journalism. The reader can neither fully assess the achievements of Tamerlane's career, nor gain a certain familiarity with his personality.
The purpose of biography is to find out what kind of person the subject of the book was, and evaluate his/her achievements. In the case of Tamerlane, the reader is never really given an explanation for how someone conquered territory so successfully and rapidly, or how a man could rise from the status of desperado to all-powerful emperor. The main argument presented is that Tamerlane, while committing atrocities, also had many cultural achievements, most notably the building of several Islamic monuments now mostly in ruins or completely nonexistent. There is no assessment of Tamerlane's psyche, what led him to believe in his destiny, just how he outwitted his opponents, and what his legacy was. Why are western scholars, even military theorists, so unfamiliar with someone whose military career was as successful and immaculate as Alexander's? How did Tamerlane as a politician manage to rise so far and fast? What psychological condition could Tamerlane have had that may have motivated his ambition, and more significantly, the genocides he so ruthlessly committed? What aspect of his personality made him an electrifying leader, and gave him the energy to vigorously campaign even up to his death as an old man? These are essential questions about Tamerlane that should be answered, or at least examined, so that readers can analyze Tamerlane with the same level of understanding as western heroes such as Alexander and Napoleon.
Instead, Justin Marozzi gives a hollow carcass of a biography, decorated with fanciful quotations and literary comparisons, but completely lacking in the real substance essential to a book that seeks to give the public an understanding of one of the greatest conquerors in history. In studying Tamerlane, we shouldn't look for the decrepit and virtually forgotten ruins and former cities of Central Asia. That does not highlight our understanding of him as a man. We need to know what he did, how he did it, why he did it, and what affect it had. We need to know these things as much as possible so that we may truly form an accurate perception of him as a statesman, soldier, and human being.
Rated by buyers -
The Good:
Tamerlane changed the face of the world, and yet remains virtually unknown in the west. He conquered almost the entire word, crippled empires, decimated the Golden Horde, stalled the Ottoman expansion, and turned glorious cities into desolate fields.
This book could have been little more than a catalogue of cities and dates, but instead we get the global view: what Temur changed, and what he did not. His empire was gone within a century. His memory was virtually erased. His recent revival is limited to Uzbekistan.
More importantly, we get the facts needed, good and bad, to assess Temur for ourselves. However Marozzi weighs the carnage against the cultural developments, the reader is fully equipped to make his or her own determination. In the end, I found Temur a wholly unsympathetic character based on the same data that led Marozzi to the opposite conclusion.
The Bad:
The critics of the book are correct in their complaints: the chronology skips around, the book includes a lengthy discusion of a historically inaccurate play, some of the prose is a little too florid.
If you can look past that, you'll enjoy the book. Chronology isn't much of a problem, because most of the jumps are between Temur's time and much later accounts, including the present day. I liked reading about modern Uzbekistan, as it fleshed out the precise nature of Temur's legacy. The other big timeline issue, beginning the book with the battle against Sultan Bayezid, is a stylistic attention-getter, and eminently excusable.
I rank the discusion of Marlowe's play with the author's discusion of modern Uzbekistan: he's telling us about Temur's legacy, which (like any historical figure) involves inaccurate information. That said, the chapter on Marlowe would have benefitted significatly from more aggressive editing. Reading what C.S. Lewis said about what Marlowe said about Tamerlane is a bit much.
While Marozzi knows his subject well, and a glance at his list of acknowledgments suggests he has studied the materials carefully, the book is practically worthless for citations. When he attributes his quotations at all, it is with a general reference to the source, without page number. For example, he has an indented quote on pages 277-78 which, from the context, I assume is a quote from Clavijo, but even if that is correct, I don't know where in his 268 pages (in the English translation) to find it. And where Marozzi doesn't quote, I can only assume his source is somewhere in one of the dozens of books listed at the end.
If you are more interested in an interesting history/travelogue about a pivotal figure in an exotic location, you'll find it in this book. If you're looking for well-sourced, narrowly focues academic work, look elsewhere.
Rated by buyers -
It feels like the author had a ton of information but did not know how to organize it. There were times when the footnotes seemed to be more relevant than what was above them. Also it felt like he did not know what he wanted the book to be. Chapters seemed to wander from the story line of Tamerlane to the author's travels to architecture without any direction. If he simply broke up the chapters, grouped relevant information together and incorporate the footnotes (instead of having some of them span two pages) that would have made this book a more coherent read. The editors really failed on this one.
The author obviously knows an incredible amount of information on the subject and the book is very interesting none-the-less.
Rated by buyers -
Marozzi has done a lot of work and there is a lot of great stuff in here. At times he seems to get carried away and feel that he was writing a Hollywood script, it makes the book a cross between a novel and a work of history. But don't get me wrong, he seems to know his subject well. The title is misleading as was the man himself. Tamur used Islam as and when it served his purpose and so implying that he was enforcing Islam is wrong. Tamur killed Sunni's and Shi'as just as happily as he killed people of other faith. Marozzi's treatment of Tamur Lung (the right way of saying the name) reminds me of Mel Gibson's cheap tricks with Christ, throw in a lot of gore and people will buy it to be shocked. Both seem to ignore the context of time. Then every now and then Marozzi throws in a few pages of utmost brilliance like when he boldly states: "Europe of that time was backwater" I doubt how many historians missed that part. He is a great story teller and reads like James Mitchner, just not as gripping. His talks about his travels seem a bit weak and not very interesting. But having said that, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in military history, Tartars, wars in Islamic world and I am sure I will read this book again someday. His map in the beginning is great, but then he chooses to throw some grey and white pictures instead of more maps.
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