The Gun »

Narrator Michael Prichard is a Los Angeles-based actor who has recorded more than 350 audiobooks including novels by Clive Cussler and Tom Glancy. He recently was named one of Smart Money's Top Ten Golden Voices.

In a tour de force, prizewinning New York Times reporter C. J. Chivers traces the invention and mass distribution of the assault rifle and its effects on war.

The Washington Post - Mark A. Keefe IV

In The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former Marine officer and Persian Gulf War veteran C.J. Chivers sets out to "lift the Kalashnikov out of the simplistic and manipulated distillations of its history." He succeeds admirably by putting the gun into its social, historical and technological context in an evocative narrative.

Prologue: Stalin's Tools of War 1

I ORIGINS

1 The Birth of Machine Guns 25

2 Machine Guns in Action 39

3 Hiram Maxim Changes War 68

4 Slaughter Made Industrial: The Great War 107

II INVENTION AND DISTRIBUTION

5 Stalin's Contest: The Invention of the AK-47 143

6 The Breakout: The Mass Production, Distribution, and Early Use of the AK-47 201

III AFTERMATH: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AK-47'S GLOBAL SPREAD

7 The Accidental Rifle 263

8 Everyman's Gun 337

Epilogue: The Twenty-first Century's Rifle 409

A Note About the M-16 Series of Rifles in 2010 415

Notes 417

Acknowledgments 449

Index 459