A review by guido_the_nature_guide
On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads by Tim Cope

4.0

An excellent and well balanced travelogue of the author's journey by horseback across the central Asian steppe, from eastern Mongolia to the Danube in Hungary. It has just the right amount of geography, history, ethnology, adventure, pathos, and personal crises. Politically, it stays very neutral, except regarding the almost genocidal Stalinist policies. Near the end of the book, when I had decided that "well balanced" was the appropriate evaluation, I was about to change my mind when the author began waxing poetic about the life nomadic, but in the next paragraph, as the author wakes up in the cozy bed of a host family, he remarks, "In the morning, however, it was with a hint of hypocrisy that I found myself relishing the feel of my warm clean skin and the fresh sheets...Life under the open sky wasn't as inviting as it had seemed the night before." So, yes, well balanced and honest.
If the amount of alcohol - primarily vodka - consumed by everyone from Mongolia to Hungary is accurate, I am sure that life on the steppe requires heavy reliance on animals; the humans are unremittingly inebriated.