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    The Gun
    The Gun
    The Gun
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Gun

    Written by C. J. Chivers

    Narrated by Michael Prichard

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    It is the world's most widely recognized weapon, the most profuse tool for killing ever made. More than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies all over the world.

    In this tour de force, prizewinning New York Times reporter C. J. Chivers traces the invention of the assault rifle, following the miniaturization of rapid-fire arms from the American Civil War, through World War I and Vietnam, to present-day Afghanistan, when Kalashnikovs and their knockoffs number as many as 100 million, one for every seventy persons on earth. It is the weapon of state repression, as well as revolution, civil war, genocide, drug wars, and religious wars; and it is the arms of terrorists, guerrillas, boy soldiers, and thugs.

    It was the weapon used to crush the uprising in Hungary in 1956. American Marines discovered in Vietnam that the weapon in the hands of the enemy was superior to their M16s.

    Fidel Castro amassed them. Yasir Arafat procured them for the P.L.O. A Kalashnikov was used to assassinate Anwar Sadat. As Osama bin Laden told the world that "the winds of faith and change have blown," a Kalashnikov was by his side. Pulled from a hole, Saddam Hussein had two Kalashnikovs.

    It is the world's most widely recognized weapon-cheap, easy to conceal, durable, deadly. But where did it come from? And what does it mean? Chivers, using a host of exclusive sources and declassified documents in the east and west, as well as interviews with and the personal accounts of insurgents, terrorists, child soldiers, and conventional grunts, reconstructs through the Kalashnikov the evolution of modern war. Along the way, he documents the experience and folly of war and challenges both the enduring Soviet propaganda surrounding the AK-47 and many of its myths.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9781400189144
    Author

    C. J. Chivers

    C.J. Chivers is a correspondent for The New York Times and a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine. His magazine story “The Fighter” won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. In 2009 he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Chivers served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps in the Persian Gulf War and on peacekeeping duty during the Los Angeles riots. He is the author of The Gun and The Fighters. 

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    Reviews for The Gun

    4/5

    97 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      detailed, balanced, great insight, great slice of history.
    • 5/5
      Thorough. A tour de force in the institutional inertia of the United States. I recommend following this book with the book Hidden Figures.
    • 5/5
      Chivers uses the wide angle, illustration-filled approach of William Manchester. The complex and changing world of arms, from the first machineguns to the present, provides context for the arms and decisions for using them. The personalities and personal stories of Gatling, Maxim, and Kalashnikov reveal not only the men, but also the governments that used their products. The US M-16 development saga is a clear counterpoint to that of the AK-47 encountered in Vietnam. As a former Marine officer, Chivers shows that he knows his stuff in describing weapons and their use in conflicts to wars.
    • 5/5
      The best researched book about AK47 I have ever read, including a very comprehensive context for its development with a quite lengthy history of guns in general and the interaction between the military and people making guns. It also covers the M16 debacle, even though it's not the main subject of the book).
    • 2/5
      The AK47 was first manufactured way back in the early 1950's and some of these very early models are still in use. It is a gun that has been used by armies, revolutionaries, hoodlums and criminals. It's simple construction gives it a robustness and longevity that mean that these weapons will be around for a long time to come.

      In the biography of the gun, and the man Kalashnikov who invented it, Chivers takes us through the murky world of the arms industry, and Soviet cold war secrets. Form how the initial concept was conceived and developed to the modern iterations of the weapon. Along the way he writes about the times these guns have been seen by the public, normally some terrorist atrocity, and the history of arms that lead to the lightweight sub machine gun.

      The history and anecdotes about this are fairly interesting, but in there is 200 pages of history about the earlier guns such as the Gatling, and a lot of the failure of the M-16 in battle. Interesting in its own way, and necessary to set the context, but it is half the book.
    • 4/5
      I got way more than I bargained for with The Gun by C.J. Chivers.

      I'm doing research for a novel, and have been reading up on some famous guns. This book is advertised as a history of the AK-47, and it's by a journalist so I knew it'd be relatively objective. Little did I realize I'd also learn so much about the Soviet Union, early US gun history (including the Gatling and the Tommy Gun) and the atrocity that was the M-16 in the Vietnam War. And that's just to name a few tangents.

      No one can deny this is a well-researched book with a lot of interesting information. It also does a great job of showing the terrifying consequences of the spread of automatic arms throughout the world. It is, however, by no means a quick or easy read, and I have to admit that I often found myself checking how much I had left to go.

      I am glad that I read it, but I am even more ecstatic that I got through it all. Take that as you will.
    • 3/5
      History of the Kalashnikov rifle and related weapons, and of Kalashnikov himself (with concessions to the unreliability of Soviet history, including the multiple stories the inventor himself told). Starts with the beginning of automatic weaponry in the Civil War and various colonial endeavors up to WWI, where the great powers ignored all the lessons they should’ve learned unloading automatics on colonized peoples, as if white skin protected against the devastation these weapons could cause. Ends with the dissemination of AK rifles and related weapons to insurgents, terrorists, and freedom fighters around the world; what started as a weapon of the state turned into a weapon against it, since the rifles are not much use against really well-trained fighters but can be used—even by barely-trained children—to disrupt and destroy civilian life. There’s not much of a through-line to the story, but it’s one part of the answer to the question ‘how did we get into this mess?’
    • 4/5
      Very informative ....This book has changed my perception towards guns ....They are the wonder of technology
    • 4/5
      Interesting! Describes history and philosophy of the world's most famous weapons.
    • 4/5
      Describing the development of the AK-47 "Kalashnikov" assault rifle, Chivers places it carefully in the political, technological, and historical context that enabled its enormous proliferation, followed by its ubiquitous distribution. The book is exhaustively researched, carefully written, and clear-headed throughout, if a little repetitious, especially in the beginning.As Chivers points out, this is a hardy weapon, and the millions of rifles already distributed throughout the globe are going to keep finding their way to one conflict zone after another for the next 50, or 100, years. We should all really know a little about them.
    • 4/5
      This book, by a combat veteran and veteran combat reporter, traces the development and effect of the AK-47 assault rifle. As the author documents, "AK-47" is a bit of a misnomer, at best a generic term for a family of related guns rather than a single model. He also helpfully (at least it was helpful to me) traces the development of modern small arms and automatic weapons up to the AK-47. He casts a skeptical eye on the canonical story of how Mikhail Kalashnikov was inspired to design a better firearm and documents that Kalashnikov himself as well as official records tell multiple inconsistent versions of this story. He also documents how Kalashnikov was hardly a lone genius but only one member (if one who made important contributions) of a typical Stalin-era collectivized design team. This book got me thinking about how something as simple as a firearm can have social, economic, and political repercussions all around the world.
    • 4/5
      While perhaps less of the book's content is about the AK-47 itself as one might be lead to believe from the cover or even the dust jacket, it does offer a very interesting historical evolution of rapid-fire guns beginning with the first commercially successful weapons in the era of the American Civil War. As the technology advances, we see many military tacticians fall behind until the arrival of the AK-47. This is where you'd expect the meat of the book to be--how and why did this gun changed so much about conflict? This section is presented mostly in a series of vignettes that describe one way in which the AK-47 has been employed, which is usually cut-off by the next before any kind of resolution has been reached by the first. Additionally, the author is prone to repeating points made earlier in the book in a way that begins to grate. Ultimately, though, it's still an excellent read and very informative, even if it did miss its mark (lame pun intended) by a bit.
    • 4/5
      The book covers a lot of ground (that is understatement). Back story on M16 early history is extremely heartbreaking. Enjoyed the last chapter the best along with coverage of African continent misuse. All but impossible to definitively ascribe human toll of this weapon. It's easy to blame Kalashnikov but the Soviet/Russian economic, political systems were primed for the proliferation of whichever weapon was declared victor in design competition. The importance of traits like hoarding, the impact of USSR fall, excess manufacturing capacity all lead to eventual worldwide propagation.
    • 4/5
      Supposedly a history of the Kalashnikov AK-47 family, this book spends the first almost 150 pages with a general history of machine guns from the American Civil War through the end of World War One. Later on it devotes a full 75 page chapter to the M-16 and the controversy of it's introduction in the Vietnam War. And a good deal of the sections actually about the Kalashnikov are spent discussing the role of the supposed inventor in the gun's development, Soviet propaganda and how the media has shaped what we know, or think we know, about the man and the gun. There are some interesting sections about it's use in Africa and other areas of the world, and the truly insane number of weapons available around the world. Overall the book is a mixed bag. Readers looking for a true history should look elsewhere, but someone looking to discover the impact of this weapons family on the world would find many things of interest. Recommended, but with the above mentioned reservations.
    • 4/5
      Thorough, exceptionally well-researched, reasonably well-written, and convincing. Covers the development of automatic weapons from the Civil War to World War II, the Soviet project to develop what became the Kalishnikov weapon system, the belated and dangerously flawed American response with the M-16, and the subsequent loss of control as the weapons moved from stockpiles to markets when the Soviet governments collapsed.Nonetheless, it seems to me the book could be about 20% shorter without significant damage.And the e-book version's just this side of unacceptably buggy. You'd think they built the file from a scan of the paper book.