Thanks to this diary I bought Weatherford's Gengis Kahn. I am just starting Chapter 4 and find the work highly readable and informative. Weatheford's background in cultural anthropology and his focus on tribal cultures well suited him for this work. It appears that he was part, possibly a key part, of an international team that, subsequent to Soviet withdrawal from Mongolia, set out to untangle the Mongol past. This involved deciphering a 'secret history', that appears to have been a court history of the family which survived in a Chinese text written using Chinese characters to phonetically represent spoken Mongolia and correlating this with the physical places and an interior understanding of the practices and legends of the group. The book is fascinating and, to me, comparable to  Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the way it contextualizes the story into the culture in which it occurs.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."