A dense journey through an ocean of iron and blood best suited for gun enthusiasts.
The first biography since the 1950s of the famed—and in some circles, infamous—gun-maker.
Gorenstein delivers a technically detailed life of John Moses Browning (1855-1926), a second-generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and second-generation gun manufacturer who found pleasure in inventing weapons. As a young boy, he built a working shotgun in his father’s shop, and he began sketching out plans for more advanced weapons. Years later, he noted, “a good idea starts a celebration of the mind, and every nerve in the body seems to crowd up to see the fireworks.” There were fireworks aplenty, as Browning developed repeating rifles, pump shotguns, and other armaments, licensing his patents to all the major manufacturers—Remington, Colt, Winchester, and so forth—and creating new designs by trial and error. Gorenstein takes a cataloger’s tone as he describes each new prototype and design. Of one early gas machine gun, he writes, “At forty-one inches long and a relatively modest thirty-five pounds, it had to be mounted on a tripod but remained far more portable than a hand-cranked Gatling gun, and it gave Colt a chance to compete in a market dominated by the Maxim gun.” The result is a text gun collectors and historians of armaments will cherish, though nonspecialists may get bogged down in such technical matters as the composition of a “locked breech system” for high-pressure weapons like Browning’s .45 pistol and automatic rifle. Gorenstein clearly demonstrates how most of the world’s guns, from the AK-47 to the latest Sig Sauer pistols, draw on Browning’s designs of more than a century ago, and he tallies many of the known assets of Browning’s estate and those of his heirs. However, he avoids reckoning with the human costs. “If there were going to be wars, there had to be guns,” he writes, “and Browning was going to give his country the best.”
A dense journey through an ocean of iron and blood best suited for gun enthusiasts.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982129-21-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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