Adam Lambert

I picked up John Man's Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection so long ago that the bookstore chain I got it from is no longer doing business in this country. So, years ago! And I got it for reasons I no longer remember either, because I think I've been subconsciously avoiding John Man's works the same way I've been avoiding Tom Holland (the historian, not the actor!)'s because they're so everywhere and easy to find.

As a biography it's fine? I'm not familiar with Mongolian history beyond where it briefly touches other areas that are familiar to me, so this was nice as a primer, and Man's prose is solid and has a lot of passion for the topic. That said, there's an undertone that didn't work for me, I hesitate to call it paternalistic but maybe it is, in the way that Man describes certain beliefs and people. Man is very thoughtful and sympathetic to the struggles of modern Mongolia, and of the ways that the memory of Genghis is complicated by Mongolia-China's history as interpreted by modern day, but at the same time... To use specific examples, he describes some Buddhist-influenced ceremonies that honour Genghis as "strange", and he calls certain enemies of Genghis as "arrogant" and despicable without really giving further detail or giving said figures the same grace he gives Genghis, whom he fully acknowledges caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in his conquests yet also speaks admiringly of. There's a line, I guess, in acknowledging the man's tremendous wartime skill and strategy and adaptability, without being breathlessly excited about the carnage he exacted.

Also, for a book that goes on a lot at times about the tactical moves Genghis made, I don't feel like I got a good grasp of how Genghis was so effective for so long and over such a large area. Yes, horses; yes, ruthlessness; yes, trusted generals -- but the logistics elude me somewhat, especially as for a great deal of it, the main moves made by Genghis's armies were to strike, grab, and then leave, with only some portions of the China side including any sort of effort to hold land and implement taxes, for a culture that valued the nomadic wilderness over the uselessness of farming. I think I need more comparisons of scale to better understand.

Anyway, the book is not just a history of Genghis Khan, but it's also about the cultural impact Genghis had as a figure of influence, memory and national identity. Those parts are absolutely fascinating but they by necessity come hand in hand with the partial memoir sections of Man's exploration of Mongolia in trying to follow Genghis' footsteps, to the place of his supposed birth to the place(s) of his supposed death and/or memorialization, with all of Man's misadventures of hiking in the wilderness, getting lost while climbing a mountain, stumbling upon helpful people in unexpected places, and so on. Makes for good stories, and it does bring the modern Mongolia of 2002 and 2009 to vivid detail, but it's there particularly that Man's idiosyncrasies come out in the telling, and my eyes glaze over.

Buzz Aldrin's No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon (co-written with Ken Abraham) was a spontaneous get from a clearance section, and when I picked it up I assumed that this was his memoir? It does have elements of a memoir, in that Aldrin tells little stories of his life experiences, but his actual memoir is titled Magnificent Desolation, which I will have to get another time. This book is more a presentation of neat little soundbites for the purpose of inspiring people, and especially younger people, who look up to him and want to pursue their dreams.

Aldrin clearly has a lot of feelings about doing as much as possible while he's still alive and able, and this book is part of the activism of trying to keep interest in science, space and space-faring activities alive. He wants to inspire excellence! Unfortunately that's not really what I'm interested in, speaking as someone whose dreams are much smaller, so reading this book was a case of "that's nice, but not really relatable" which is frustrating because not everything has to be relatable, but the book's prose is trying so hard to make ALL of it relatable, and urging the reader to Innovate! And Think Out of the Box! And Not Be Afraid of Rejection! Aldrin is so upbeat and positive, there's outright whiplash when he drops tidbits out of the blue, eg. how his mother died, before right on back to going, Surround Yourself With People Who Will Bring Out the Best in You! Don't Be Afraid To Think Out of the Box! Be Open-minded! Stand Up For Yourself!

I don't mean this to denigrate, and I totally get Aldrin's frustration that NASA stopped going to the moon, and efforts to get to Mars are taking so long, that he needs to pour that frustration into this book (along with other projects) to remind people of the best of humankind's accomplishments and capabilities and to be unafraid to pursue excellence even when times are hard... and have unfortunately become harder since the time this book was published almost ten years ago. For example, this book gets dated for his namechecking Musk and Bezos as innovators who make the world a better place.

For Aldrin's purpose, the book is what it is, a collection of anecdotes to inspire and encourage optimism, so there's a sense of flattening and simplification for that. There's only allusions to Aldrin's difficulties in and after NASA, his depression and alcoholism, or even his time in the Korean War -- which, as he writes it, he remembers that war fondly, and not much more than that.