The Rise of the House of Gorkha provides us with a very readable narrative of how the work of the political conquest of territorial Nepal was achieved between 1740 and 1816. Relying on the more fundamental work done by Mahesh C Regmi on the economic incentives and impact of the era of conquest, Stiller provided us what is still the best account of the relationship between land and the military that drove the machine of conquest. Prithvinarayan Shah appears as a genius in Stiller's work but the book is no hagiography of the kind one encounters in nationalist accounts. Here is history not just with tons of facts but facts presented in a carefully crafted narrativce to provide fundamental insights into an era of history, an understanding of which is essential to our knowledge of just about everything in today's Nepal.