Customer Reviews

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

There are sundry problems with this book. It didn't hold my attention, and it took me weeks to finally be able to finish it off, instead of a couple days. As mentioned in the Washington Post review, she makes many sweeping statements without supporting them, which could be fine in a human interest story in the paper, but not for a history book. She also has issues with incorrect technical concepts, such as distinguishing between bullets and cartridges, or explaining gas or recoil operated mechanisms (which actually aren't decendants of Gatling's invention). For some reason, she changed the famous quote to Maxim about how to make a fortune from "fool Europeans" to "[them]" -- it's as ridiculous as quoting the Gettysburg Address as "[Some] years ago..." Not only does it lack the pizazz of the original quote, but it removes some of the historical context.
The biggest issue I have is with the format of the book. The amount of information about Gatling himself and his process of invention would perhaps fill one chapter. The rest of the book is filled with tangents and non-sequiturs. I didn't count the lines, but it seemed that she mentioned Gatling moving to Missouri and then spend more time talking about Mark Twain, whose only link that she makes is that they both had lived there at some point in their lives. She seems to be trying to make each chapter have a theme, but it only really congeals for the chapters about patents and legacy, which are the introduction and conclusion. The chapter themes don't have a cohesive, progressive relationship. There isn't a chronological ordering of events, and she'll bounce back and forth through time for decades outside of Gatling's lifetime. She also repeats the same facts multiple times -- Gatling's family, his intend to reduce misery of war, Abe Lincoln invented a way to get steamboats off of sand bars.

I bought the book thinking I was going get get a history of the Gatling Gun. Sadly the book was about the US patent office in antebellum America and other sundry topics. No techical specification of any of the many versions of the Gatling Gun that were produced were in the book. There were no discussions of the gun's employments in battles. The author spent the 1st 2/3rds of the book and mentioned Gatling perhaps 4 times and the gun not at all. The book should be entitled "a rambling walk through the patent office with brief digressions on the Gatling Gun" Very disapointing.

If you want to know about R. Gatling and his gun, go to wikipedia. This book provides about 50 pages of information on its supposed subject. There were many times i wanted to throw this in the trash or give it away but kept reading, hoping that something would happen. Sadly, it did not. This book is without focus and full of extraneous commentary. It's words for words sake. Where's the editor for this book? Fired?

In 1862, with the American Civil War deepening, and showing signs of becoming a long and bloody maelstrom, Indiana businessman and inventor Richard Jordan Gatling came up with a weapon that was so terrible that he believed that it would end large drawn-out wars. However, the Gatling gun accomplished no such thing - it did indeed help to make wars more bloody and horrific, but it did nothing to end them. This is the history of Mr. Gatling's invention, and the rise of America's power, and the terrible costs of war.

OK, where do I start? The title of this book really caught my eye, and I had high hopes for it when I picked it up. Sadly, those high hopes were not realized. I found the narrative of the story to be badly out of focus, with the author spending considerable time expressing her opinions on weapons and so forth, and analyzing this, that, and the other thing. Before long, you begin to wonder if the book is really about anything in particular at all.

So, let me agree with those who say that Ms. Keller picked a great subject, but did not succeed in giving it the treatment it deserved. I definitely recommend against this book.

Author Keller's inability to provide actual details about the subject Gatling Gun is only exceeded by her lack of technical knowlege of firearms. Though the book has limited historical information of the 19th Century Industrial age, it is titled and sold as an accounting of the subject weapon. There are only scant descriptions of the actual workings of the machine gun and no details of the materials, methods of manufacture and use of the "Marvel."

While the author painted an interesting tableau, depicting the 19th-century environment for inventors like Gatling -- it glossed over the simple problem-solving involved in the invention(s) itself. I was not expecting a technical explanation but this book was a bit thin. The story-telling, the rhythm of the book, was well done, however. Probably an good companion volume to a second, more in-depth book on the gun itself

I have to say that I agree with a number of the other reviewers regarding this book, it does indeed devolve into tangents a large portion of the time. However, as an academic, I can see Keller's diversions as relatively successful attempts to contextualize the information about Gatling and his gun and place it in the larger picture of American and military history. Although at times she belabors a point (Gatling's belief he was limiting war and not expanding it is reiterated time and again), I found this approach very helpful. Finally, it was very nice to have a bibliography and endnotes in a journalistic book, although apparently at some point the publisher forgot to include the note-markers in the text, so one has to puzzle out which footnotes go to which quotes in the book.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the historical context and consequences of military invention (a la Victor Davis Hanson's Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think). If you are looking for a more technical discussion of the machine gun or its effects on military tactics, look elsewhere.