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Spread too thin for what it claims to cover, but lots of good information.
I would have probably gotten more out of this book had it been required reading as part of a college course on the subject. As is, it was incredibly dense and tried to cover too large a subject. It's good, but just too much at once.
I loved the course that this book accompanied, and there was so much new info therin.
Christian drags the biggest landmass in the world back into its proper place in world history with this dense and often hilarious look at that greater part of Asia that everyone ignores. Draw a square starting in Helsinki, skirt the Great Whiteness to the west and draw a line down through Turkey, swing east almost south of the Caspian all the way through Central Asia, ignoring the Middle East, get to Xinjiang and bend Northeast all the way to Magadan. That's what this book covers. Steppes, nomad...
He has gone on to help invent Big History. He always thought big: this, perhaps more than any other book, explains how and why the steppe was different from the start. You'd never know what's in there by the title.