Full title: "After Tamerlane - The rise & fall of global empires, 1400-2000".

In this 500-page roller coaster through modern history, the author tries to point out how the tides of time are shaped by empires, created and destroyed, from the great Mongolian conqueror Tamerlane in the 15th century and until economical globalization and America's world hegemony at the brink of the 21st century.

While a book on this topic could be interesting and well written, "After Tamerlane" isn't either. It's actually quite bad. The author manages to create a mish-mash of topics on almost every page, racing through the world both in the time and space dimensions unpredictably from paragraph to paragraph.

I usually drop books like this after a short time, and I planned to stop reading this one a few times, but something kept me going. Perhaps it were the several (though painfully few) good segments scattered through it occasionally that caught my interest.

Definitely not recommended.