I am reading ahead for next semester, and for the leadership class, one of the assignments is to read the biography of someone we perceive to be a leader. I started with Mari Sandoz’s biography of Crazy Horse mostly because I had it and had been looking for an excuse to read it. I just finished Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford that I bought at the Island Bookstore in Corolla, NC, over Thanksgiving weekend. Interestingly enough, in his epilogue, Weatherford suggests that Crazy Horse and Genghis Khan share the plight of nomadic cultures when they clash with urban cultures:
“The clash between the nomadic and urban cultures did not end with Genghis Khan, but it would never again reach the level to which he brought it. Civilization pushed the tribal people toward the ever more distant edges of the world. Chiefs such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Lakota Siouz, Red Eagle of the Muskogee, Tecumseh of the Shawnee, and Shaka Zulu of South Africa valiantly but vainly continued the quest of Genghis Khan over the coming centuries. Without knowing anything about the Mongols or the Genghis Khan, these other chiefs faced the same struggles and fought the same battles across Africa and throughout the Americas, but history had moved beyond them. In the end, sedentary cultures won the long world; the future belonged to the civilized children of Cain, who eternally encroached upon th eopen lands of the tribes” (pp. 266-267).
Sandoz’s biography was written from the Native American point of view, which made it an interesting read. She gave enough “white man” details to be able to match it with historical battles but the reader got a much better sense of what was lost by the Native Americans.
The Weatherford book did not just cover Genghis Khan but also the whole Mongol empire. What was interesting was that someone that has been painted as a barbarian really had quite far reaching ideas about freedom of religion and the importance of government and policy. I thought about my policy class a couple times when Weatherford discussed Khan’s use of policy and propaganda to avoid warfare.
Here are the references:
Sandoz, Mari. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1942. (My edition was published in 1992, the 50th anniversary and is still in print.)
Weatherford, Jack. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004.
