C. J. Chivers was an officer in the US Marine Corps before joining the New York Times as a senior writer covering crime, conflict and the arms trade amongst other things. So, he’s well placed to write a book on one of the most prolific weapons of the 20th Century – the AK-47 assault rifle.There is some very good information here and this book is generally very well written. However, I found a couple of things a little odd. First, it contains an awful lot of stuff that isn’t about the AK-47. There are chapters on Hiram Maxim, the Gatling Gun and the use of machine guns in World War One. There is also almost a whole chapter devoted to the early development and use of the American M-16. All good background information, but probably more than one third of the text here isn’t about the AK-47 at all. It’s difficult to escape the feeling that the first draft of this book may have come up a little short on the word count, and that additional material was added to make it achieve a respectable length.It also feels a little odd that Mr Chivers doesn’t really tackle one of the most interesting questions about the AK-47 in any depth or with any conclusion. For a long time now, it has been suggested that Mikhail Kalashnikov didn’t invent the AK-47 at all. Kalashnikov was a senior sergeant in a tank regiment who was wounded in combat 1941 and drafted to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms in 1942. Kalashnikov had no formal engineering or firearms design training, and was a self-described “tinkerer” who dabbled in invention. In 1946, the Soviet Union announced a competition to design a new assault rifle. A design submitted by Factory Number Two in Korov was accepted and went on to become the AK-47. The design was attributed to Kalashnikov and the service version named after him (AK – Avtomat Kalashnikova). However, the AK-47 bears notable similarities to an earlier weapon, the German MP43/44 “Sturmgewehr” (the first assault rifle) which was designed by Hugo Schmeisser. Schmeisser was captured in 1945 and forced to work on Soviet weapon development in the city of Izhevsk. It certainly seems likely that Schmeisser had some input into the design of the AK-47 (in 2009 Kalashnikov finally admitted that Schmeisser might have “helped” in the design), but all documents relating to Schmeisser’s work for the Soviet Union remain classified. It has been suggested that attributing the design of the AK-47 to an untrained and lowly Russian sergeant was simply a propaganda myth which suited the Soviet Union much better than admitting that a captured German engineer was responsible. Although this is mentioned in the book, there seems to be no final resolution. So, a pretty reasonable book on the AK-47, but possibly not the definitive account. Very well researched and interesting, most of the time. It's more the history of machine guns in general rather than the AK-47 in particular, though it does spend the most time discussing the AK. Does an excellent job of explaining how the machine gun has changed war and how the AK - because it's simple, reliable, and everywhere - has helped sustain even poorly trained, disorganized rebel groups, terrorists, etc. like they never could have been sustained before.
What do You think about The Gun (2010)?
Interesting historical record; very detailed and informative. Well researched
—krystalharson
It was a very nice book to read, 99% of the information was accurate.
—angana94
