I have to wish this wasn't the standard history on the Mongols. In the second edition he adds a chapter on scholarship since 1985. Read that, and see what a change there has been in our ideas. But he has 'not tried to update the main text of this book to take account of what has been published since it was written'. This means - sorry - his book mustn't be the standard history. The main text is quite negative, and the update makes that unjustified. At times he does descend to caricature - as a joke, but I just can't laugh.

That added chapter, a bibliographical one, can send you to a number of splendid books. I followed up on those and the horizons open...

The 'standard work' tag is self-perpetuating. There are others. For an introduction to the Mongols, I'd suggest this: The A to Z of the Mongol World Empire by Paul Buell.

Footnote: the bit of caricature. If you're curious, I mean this: Feeling his age, and realising that there were lands still to conquer and people yet left unmassacred, he enquired whether there was available any medicine of immortality. I've nothing against humour in scholarship. I do find David Morgan's jokes clumsily inserted, but I suspect that's because my sense of humour isn't his. For this one, however, I can make no excuse. It doesn't belong in a scholarly book.