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The Gun, September 2011
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
The Gun, October 2010
Hardcover / e-Book
Simon and Schuster
September 2011
On Sale: September 6, 2011
496 pages ISBN: 0743271734 EAN: 9780743271738 Kindle: B003V1WT7C Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
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Other Editions Hardcover (October 2010)
Non-Fiction
At a secret arms-design contest in Stalin’s Soviet Union,
army technicians submitted a stubby rifle with a curved
magazine. Dubbed the AK-47, it was selected as the Eastern
Bloc’s standard arm. Scoffed at in the Pentagon as crude and
unimpressive, it was in fact a breakthrough—a compact
automatic that could be mastered by almost anyone, last
decades in the field, and would rarely jam. Manufactured by
tens of millions in planned economies, it became first an
instrument of repression and then the most lethal weapon of
the Cold War. Soon it was in the hands of terrorists. In a
searing examination of modern conflict and official folly,
C. J. Chivers mixes meticulous historical research,
investigative reporting, and battlefield reportage to
illuminate the origins of the world’s most abundant firearm
and the consequences of its spread. The result, a tour de
force of history and storytelling, sweeps through the
miniaturization and distribution of automatic firepower, and
puts an iconic object in fuller context than ever before.
The Gun dismantles myths as it
moves from the naïve optimism of the Industrial Revolution
through the treacherous milieu of the Soviet Union to the
inside records of the Taliban. Chivers tells of the
19th-century inventor in Indianapolis who designs a Civil
War killing machine, insisting that more-efficient slaughter
will save lives. A German attaché who observes British
machine guns killing Islamic warriors along the Nile advises
his government to amass the weapons that would later flatten
British ranks in World War I. In communist Hungary, a
locksmith acquires an AK-47 to help wrest his country from
the Kremlin’s yoke, beginning a journey to the gallows. The
Pentagon suppresses the results of firing tests on severed
human heads that might have prevented faulty rifles from
being rushed to G.I.s in Vietnam. In Africa, a millennial
madman arms abducted children and turns them on their
neighbors, setting his country ablaze. Neither pro-gun nor
anti-gun, The Gun builds to a terrifying sequence, in
which a young man who confronts a trio of assassins is
shattered by 23 bullets at close range. The man survives to
ask questions that Chivers examines with rigor and
flair. Throughout, The Gun animates
unforgettable characters—inventors, salesmen, heroes,
megalomaniacs, racists, dictators, gunrunners, terrorists,
child soldiers, government careerists, and fools. Drawing
from years of research, interviews, and from declassified
records revealed for the first time, he presents a richly
human account of an evolution in the very experience of war.
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