Your review is spot on. The author takes a fascinating and neglected protagonist, a subject which held great promise, to which he adds precious little original scholarship.

The writing has little life and there’s not enough of a consistent attempt to try to bring context into the various florid descriptions of 14th century Central Asia. The descriptions of each given conquered metropolis or territory as progressively more grand than the next and each set of horrors more extreme than the last soon make the narrative lose color and run together.

Some of the more interesting pages deal with the author’s own travels in the region yet he touches only briefly and intermittently on his own journey. He occasionally interjects subject matter from his first hand experience but it doesn’t seem to fit particularly well with the rest of the narrative.

His attempt to work the historical treatment of Tamerlane into the early part of the work is somewhat clumsy as well.

Thankfully, the subject matter itself is enough to hold the readers interest, especially a reader with a predisposition towards the history of Central Asia. There are many easily recognized political, religious and cultural lessons which can be applied to our modern day in terms of the west’s dealings with the region and Islam.

One can only wonder what the incarnation that such a rich subject as Tamerlane may have taken had his life and times been chronicled by a Lattimore or Hopkirk. Perhaps it is the high bar of scholarship that has preceded Marozzi which makes his work seem relatively pedestrian in comparison. In one reader’s local library Marozzi’s work does not even qualify to sit among his fellow Central Asia historians and his work is shunted off to the fiction shelves.

I personally was not wondering as I went along which sections were fictional and which were truth: I didn’t care. Read the book to enjoy it, just immerse yourself in it, what does it matter if he stretched the truth at times?

I felt the same way about the James Frey controversy. Everyone praised his book and said it helped them recover from addiction and bla bla bla, and oh my god Mr Frey thank you thank you, and then it was exposed that parts were not fact, and everyone became furious like, “Oh, you lied to us, you misled us.” What’s the difference? If it helped people cope with drug problems and the book changed their lives what does it matter at ALL if the events were factual or not?

Let me know what you think. I loved DRY.

http://sulz.daria.be

It was somewhat the same way with me. As I mentioned, Didion has so many of the drillable virtues taught by college writing classes. Therefore, as I went through those classes and associated with those types, I found myself exhorted from all directions to read Didion.

A related thing happened with Philip Larkin. I’d never heard of him, and then all of the sudden… bang, constant reminders of the indispensability of “This Be The Verse.”

It’s funny how sometimes you hear about the same thing over and over again all in one go. A year ago, I had little, if any knowledge of Joan Didion. Over the past six months, her works has been constantly recommended to me from several, but totally unrelated, friends.