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31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
great subject, disappointing treatment, June 3, 2008
This review is from: Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (Hardcover)
I have three problems with this book. 1) Ms Keller takes us off on a survey of 19th century America instead of concentrating on Richard Gatling. What did John Sutter have to do with the Gatling gun? Well, nothing, but she drags him in by the heels nevertheless. The entire first half of the book is given over to these digressions.
2) She doesn't like firearms--a disabling qualification in somebody who sets out to write the biography of the first successful rapid-fire gun. "The fact that arms are necessary to a nation's survival is a grubby and uncomfortable truth." Uncomfortable to Ms Keller, no doubt, but not to those of us who have used firearms for hunting, for target shooting, and during our military service.
3) She is so enthused by Richard Gatling (though not his gun as an enforcer of government policy!) that she shades the facts. To read her book, you'd conclude that the machine-gun problem was solved by Gatling in 1862 instead of by Hiram Maxim twenty years later--that the single-barrel, auto-loading, auto-firing machine guns of World War One were just minor improvements on Gatling's design. Tain't so.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Term paper time, August 25, 2008
This review is from: Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (Hardcover)
Did you ever have to write a term paper on something you knew NOTHING about? You'd repeat the title, rearrange it and the repeat it again and then add in irrelevant asides, anything to generate words in a futile attempt to cover up the fact that you had NOTHING to say about the subject.
This book is one of those term papers. "More than a biography" says one of the "top reviewers". How about "where's the biography"?
About the only things I learned about Gatling was his name, that he moved to St Louis and that he got smallpox. That's it for a whole book.
There's lots of sociological waffle about mid nineteenth American territorial and technical development. A lot of talk about how the Civil war was relevant. But there's close to zilch on what is supposed to be the subject of this book - the man and his gun.
I want my money back.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
SIMPERING PROSE AND LITTLE ELSE, February 16, 2011
This is a review of MR. GATLING'S TERRIBLE MARVEL: THE GUN THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING AND THE MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS WHO INVENTED IT by Julia Keller. Mine is the hard cover edition published by Viking in 2008. Its cover boasts that this book even won the Pulitzer Prize.
That may have something to do with the author's position as cultural critic on the CHICAGO TRIBUNE or the literary quality of her writing. I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't learn much about Mr. Gatling's famous gun which was why I bought the book in the first place. Apparently the Pulitzer Committee had no interest in the Gatling Gun either.
An example of this is the author's treatment of Custer's Last Stand 1876. He'd been offered a battery of Gatling Guns, but declined to take them along on his date with destiny at the Little Big Horn. This could have been an interesting chapter in the history of Mr. Gatling's gun, but Ms. Keller dispenses with that and substitutes her opinion that Custer was merely a "simpering, arrogant cavalry officer...[notable primarily for his] haughtiness and overconfidence, [and] preening hubris..." (p. 187}. In other words, Custer was too stupid and egocentric to appreciate the fact that Gatling "worked on his gun continuously after obtaining the original patent in 1862, fixing problems that users encountered ...[to the point where]Gatling guns rarely 'malfunctioned'..." (p. 188).
This is clever prose, but it doesn't tell you much about the role of the Gatling Gun at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Neither the author nor the Pulitzer Committee seem to know anything about guns or the military history they shaped and that's the problem with this book. People who don't know anything about guns shouldn't write books about them.
Anybody who has ever pulled a trigger knows the problem with Mr. Gatling's "Terrible Marvel." It was the ammunition. Metallic cartridges were still being perfected and propellants were still limited to black powder which fouled and generated a dense, acrid cloud of smoke when it was fired. The gunners, in other words, couldn't maintain visual contact with their target after the first round was fired and they had to operate their gun standing up within rifle range of their enemy. By the time smokeless propellants were developed, Hiram Maxim and John M. Browning had developed better designs which superseded Gatling's. Ms. Keller, however, prefers to regale the reader with her absurd opinions about General Custer.
John Ellis' SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN came out in 1975 and it did a better job of summarizing the social impact of rapid fire guns. It also provided more information about the Gatling Gun, including some of the same mistakes that Ms. Keller repeats. If you're really interested in the Gatling Gun, Joseph Berk's GATLING GUN is a much better source. If you like simpering prose, however, then you'll love MR. GATLING'S TERRIBLE MARVEL.
I don't and that's why I only gave this book one star.
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