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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Would have been better as a magazine article - by another author., March 15, 2008
As a firearms enthusiast and fan of the AK-47 and its variants, I checked this out from my local library without reading any reviews beforehand. I finished it in a matter of hours during two legs of a flight and now truly regret not using that time to read thru the SKYMALL magazine.
AK-47 fails on every level. It fails as biography of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the gun's inventor. It fails as technical history of a rifle. And it fails miserably at what the bulk of the book is directed toward: political history. While any of these approaches (or all three) could easily, and more successfully, be distilled into a decent magazine article (and have been), none are even remotely achieved by Larry Kahaner.
What begins as the story of Kalashnikov deteriorates into half-baked rehashes of global conflicts with a "the rag-tag rebels succeeded because of the affordability of the AK" thrown in each time. And while every author is indeed entitled to their own opinion with regard to firearms, Kahaner's disgust for the AK-47 (and all firearms and the 2nd Amendment and so on) is apparent - and the reader quickly feels duped into picking up what appears to be an historical overview. Kahaner even goes so far as to blame the AK for the use of child soldiers in some conflicts due to its simplicity of use.
AK-47 finishes up lambasting Kalashnikov for marketing his name and spends way too many pages describing failed vodka ventures - none of which relates in any way to the subject matter at hand (or readers who care about the firearm).
For shooting enthusiasts and/or history buffs, this could have been an intelligent read if approached by the right author. I am not so narrow-minded that I would not admit that the affordable, reliable AK-47 has made a difference in global conflicts - I just want to read about how it has from a reliable, objective source.
Simply put, the worst piece of nonfiction regarding any subject I have read in a long, long time.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Everything the AK-47 is, this book isn't, May 25, 2009
The AK-47 (the weapon, not the book) turned out to be a reliable rifle that got the job done. This book turns out to be not all that reliable, and it didn't get the job done. I expected a lot more technical detail on the weapon, how it operates, and so on. It's clear that the author is not a gun guy and had no interest in becoming an expert on the subject simply because he was writing a book about a gun.
The book's focus on the effect that the AK-47 has had on the world was interesting, and not something that I had spent much time thinking about before. To that extent, the book was valuable. The chapter on the UN's abortive effort to control trafficking in weapons like the AK-47, however, reflects an astonishing naivete on the author's part. Although the author tries to be balanced in his reporting on the impact of the AK-47, he suffers from a bias that affects what he mentions and what he doesn't. As many of the other reviewers complain, the author seems to think that the problem with the AK-47 is with the object and with not the people who use it.
The author's subtext for the book is "If only the AK-47 had never been invented..." Well, if it hadn't been, people would still be killing each other for the usual reasons, and the author doesn't adequately support his hypothesis that the carnage would be less.
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
AK-47; easy read -- not much new, April 1, 2007
This review is from: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (Hardcover)
I am strongly ambivalent about AK47. On the one hand it's easy to read and it covers an interesting subject that is relevant today - that easy access to the AK series of weapons in the third world today has helped fuel violence in the last 20 years and is likely to do so for another generation. On the other hand, the book is really a poor political analysis; a book that would not have even been published except for its tie to the AK.
I began the book with high hopes but as I was reading the first few chapters I became increasingly uncomfortable. Finally I realized what I was reading was more of a political commentary interspersed with discussions of the AK.
First, despite his argument that the AK "fuels" conflicts around the world you have to keep in mind that the AK is only one variable in a complex equation of why violence exists. His implication that the AK somehow causes the violence is simplistic and he never really analyzes other causal factors. Having said that, in a strategic sense, the AK does provide the "means" in the strategic equation of a given group trying to achieve a particular goal.
Kahaner also tries to answer the question as to "why" the AK has become so prevalent in today's conflicts. He does this by addressing three factors; political context, arms trading, and the AK's low cost. This leads to the books second weakness: Kahaner spends most of his time with light-weight political analysis. He seems to rely more on "popular" interpretations of past and current wars vice any serious analysis of a given situation. He does this even to the point of throwing in several conspiracy theories without question, and he sometimes engages in outright speculation without supporting his claims by identifying sources. At the same time his narratives on the arms trade shed no new light on the subject, and are not documented despite some rather interesting claims.
At the end of the day the author has no apparent expertise in the areas of international relations or military affairs, which probably explains his weak efforts at putting the AK in political context and showing "why" the weapon has become so common. I have to admit that when I read the author's bio and his list of publications I had reservations; with one exception his area of expertise is the business world. The brief exception mentioned in the bio was a comment that he, "covered the infantry training center at Fort Benning for Knight-Ridder newspapers." But even here his credibility is in question because at one point during the book he writes about a Peruvian general attending the Army's School of the Americas, now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, at Fort Benning. Unfortunately, at the time the general attended, the school was located in Panama; a small factor but someone familiar with Fort Benning and the school would have known it had been in Panama at the time.
I do agree the AK has affected cultural patterns in some areas of the world; Kahaner points out the AK has not only become an element of barter - a replacement for currency - but that it has also given some traditional tribal groups more power over their rivals, and that the AK has replaced traditional methods of "warfare" in those areas. Also he notes that the AK has become either a status symbol in some groups and a perceived day-to-day necessity in others. And it certainly has become a bit of a cultural icon. But none of this is new.
About all that can be said of the book is that it presents nothing new, but it does put what is known about the AK's impact on society in one place for the lay reader. If your're looking for an easy read with a quick overview of the AK's impact on the world's conflicts today, and as long as you can ignore the political analyis, this is the book for you.
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