Reviews, THE GUN.

“….an objective, fast-moving biography and analysis of this infamous utensil of death.”                                       

                                                          —The Dallas Morning News.

THE GUN includes many vignettes and character studies across 150 years of history. The Dallas Morning News focused in part on the effects of early machine gunnery and on the profile of Hiram Maxim, the trigamist and suspected draft dodger from backwoods Maine, who moved to Europe, where he invented and sold the first true automatic weapon, which altered warfare as it had been known. Back to the review:

“The British, including Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill, were quicker to catch up with the new rules. When the young Churchill saw the mounds of Sudanese corpses, sliced and pulverized by American Hiram Maxim’s machine gun, he was disabused of all romantic notions of “civilized power”…. …As with Kalashnikov and Gatling, Maxim is profiled here – and what a dude he was! The closest thing to nice anyone said about him was that he had prevented more men from dying of old age than anyone in history. He was greedy, opportunistic, narcissistic, racist, fame-hungry, amoral and brilliant… …It was but a few short steps from Maxim to Kalashnikov.”

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A black-market arms dealer offers a folding-stock AKM knock-off for examination and sale. This seller sold food in the open at his small shop, but kept rifles in wheat sacks under the vegetable stands. Asking price was $650. Photo by the author. Iraq. 2006.

Notes

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