I highly recommend "Empire of the Summer Moon"[1], a fascinating account of the final decades of the Comanche tribe.<p>1 - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...</a>
I used to refer to what Bret Devereaux is criticizing as the "Star Trek view of other cultures". USS Enterprise arrives at a planet times the size of the earth to find ten billion sheep herding nomads with a single leader who lives in a tent or some such.<p>From there, it is a hop, skip, and a jump to Biden proposing Iraq be divided into three separate zones among the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunnis ... completely neglecting the actual ethnic, religious, and power dynamics on the ground. Or, people turning a blind eye to the slaughters that happened in Bosnia in the 90s (a sprinkling of that and Chechnya over what was cooked in Aghanistan gave us the multinational Jihadi networks that organized 9/11 among other things) because "these people have been killing each other for 600 years" ... An implicit reference to the Ottomans whose ancestors came from the Eurasian steppe.<p>So, yes, I love Devereaux's work, especially because I run into a lot of people who think and talk about actual history through the filter of these shows/books.
This seems like a strange sort of criticism to be levying. Am I supposed to be shocked to learn that the barbarian horse lords in a fantasy series have very little basis in real world history?