From

This superior history of the AK family of assault rifles begins with the invention of the machine gun by Hiram Maxim and traces automatic weapons through WWII. In 1947, Russian army officer Mikhail Kalashnikov adapted a German design of automatic infantry rifle to become the AK (for Avtomat Kalashnikov). It first attracted world attention in Vietnam by proving superior to the American M-16. Since then it has developed several relatives and been produced in many other countries, the total running into the hundreds of millions. It has armed regular armies, irregular armies, police forces, terrorists, common criminals, and ordinary householders in the majority of the worldÔÇÖs countries, creating a proliferation problem that has to date killed far more people than the nuclear kind. The author is a former U.S. Marine officer and prizewinning journalist who has written incisively and researched exhaustively. It lends force to his arguments that some of his informants have been assassinated with assault rifles for talking. --Roland Green

Review

Advance Praise for

The Gun

ÔÇ£C. J. ChiversÔÇÖ The Gun does exactly what the best art history or music writing doesÔÇöit opens our eyes to see anew the familiar. Chivers' reach and scope is syncretic, omnivorousÔÇöhe is dazzling in his research and reporting. This is a book about connections between people and culture, people and history, nations with nations. Chivers pulls together vast threads of an expanding portrait and what emerges is startling. The Gun is filled with a sense of discovery in the way that John McPheeÔÇÖs work is filled with delight, tribulation, and surprise.ÔÇØ

--Doug Stanton, author of Horse Soldiers

ÔÇ£The Gun is for those who wonder how we fight today and why we fight that way. C. J. Chivers has given us a seminal work that will be respected by future generations trying to understand us.ÔÇØ

--James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers, Fly Boys, and The Imperial Cruise

ÔÇ£_The Gun_ is a model of research, historical writing, military expertise, and a soldierÔÇÖs ungrudging respect for a weapon that really works.ÔÇØ

--Thomas Powers, author of Intelligence Wars

ÔÇ£C. J. Chilvers tells a remarkable story of how this one, superbly reliable firearm became the most abundant ever produced, and was to exceed the consequences even of Soviet nuclear know-how in the Cold War, and beyond.ÔÇØ

--Alistair Horne, author of The Price of Glory and A Savage War of Peace

ÔÇ£Thanks to C. J. Chivers, every G.I. and Marine in Vietnam who threw down his jammed M-16 in despair can trace the development of the better weapon he envied. The Gun is part a biography of Mikhail Kalashnikov and his AK-47, part grim social history and, in all its parts, entirely absorbing.ÔÇØ

--A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975

ÔÇ£C.J. Chivers, a brilliant war correspondent, is an equally capable military historian. By telling the story of a gun--well, not just any gun but arguably ÔÇÿtheÔÇÖ gun--he reveals much about crime, war, and terror, and he does so in convincing and compelling fashion.ÔÇØ

--Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers