John Anthony Garnet Man is a British historian and travel writer. His special interests are China, Mongolia and the history of written communication. He takes particular pleasure in combining historical narrative with personal experience.
He studied German and French at Keble College, Oxford, before doing two postgraduate courses, a diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, completing the latter in 1968. After working in journalism with Reuters and in publishing with Time-Life Books, he turned to writing, with occasional forays, into film, TV and radio.
In the 1990s, he began a trilogy on the three major revolutions in writing: writing itself, the alphabet and printing with movable type. This has so far resulted in two books, Alpha Beta and The Gutenberg Revolution, both republished in 2009. The third, on the origin of writing, is on hold, because it depends on access to Iraq.
Books in order of publishing:
The Birth of our Planet (1997)
Gobi: Tracking the Desert (1997)
Atlas of the Year 1000 (1999)
Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World (2000)
Comets, Meteors and Asteroids (2001)
The Gutenberg Revolution: The Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World (2003)
Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection (2004)
Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome (2005); (reprint as Attila the Hun: A Barbarian King and the Fall of Rome, Bantam Books, 2006)
Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China (2006)
The Terracotta Army: China’s First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation (2007)
The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World (2008)
Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe’s Discovery of the East (2009)
The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan (2009)
Samurai: The Last Warrior (2011)
Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior (2012)
The Mongol Empire: The Conquests of Genghis Khan and the Making of Modern China (2014)
Saladin: The Life, The Legend and the Islamic Empire (2015)
The Amazons: The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World (2017)
Empire of Horses: The First Nomadic Civilization and the Making of China (2019)
Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict (2025)
