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The Gun
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
It is the world's most widely recognized weapon, the most profuse tool for killing ever made. More than 50 national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies all over the world. In this tour de force, prizewinning New York Times reporter C. J. Chivers traces the invention of the assault rifle, following the miniaturization of rapid-fire arms from the American Civil War, through World War I and Vietnam, to present-day Afghanistan, when Kalashnikovs and their knockoffs number as many as 100 million, one for every 70 persons on earth.
It is the weapon of state repression, as well as revolution, civil war, genocide, drug wars, and religious wars; and it is the arms of terrorists, guerrillas, boy soldiers, and thugs. It was the weapon used to crush the uprising in Hungary in 1956. American Marines discovered in Vietnam that the weapon in the hands of the enemy was superior to their M16s. Fidel Castro amassed them. Yasir Arafat procured them for the P.L.O. A Kalashnikov was used to assassinate Anwar Sadat. As Osama bin Laden told the world that "the winds of faith and change have blown," a Kalashnikov was by his side. Pulled from a hole, Saddam Hussein had two Kalashnikovs.
It is the world's most widely recognized weapon - cheap, easy to conceal, durable, deadly. But where did it come from? And what does it mean? Chivers, using a host of exclusive sources and declassified documents in the east and west, as well as interviews with and the personal accounts of insurgents, terrorists, child soldiers, and conventional grunts, reconstructs through the Kalashnikov the evolution of modern war. Along the way, he documents the experience and folly of war and challenges both the enduring Soviet propaganda surrounding the AK-47 and many of its myths.
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- A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
- By: Daniel Bolger
- Narrated by: Steve Coulter
- Length: 20 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Over a 35-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both theaters of the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in meetings with top-level military and civilian players, where strategy was made and managed. At the same time, he regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat actions - unusual for a general.
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An apolitical account of our recent wars.
- By DMgraphicGlass on 04-07-15
By: Daniel Bolger
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The Unknowns
- The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home
- By: Patrick K. O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliantly researched and vividly told, The Unknowns is a timeless tale of heeding the calls of duty and brotherhood and humanizes the most consequential event of the 20th century, which still casts a shadow a century later. Celebrated military historian and best-selling author Patrick O'Donnell illuminates the saga behind the creation of The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and recreates the moving ceremony during which it was consecrated.
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The Unknowns
- By Logophile on 05-09-19
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The Harlem Hellfighters
- When Pride Met Courage
- By: Walter Dean Myers, Bill Miles
- Narrated by: Corey Allen
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Walter Dean Myers and renowned filmmaker Bill Miles deftly tell the true story of the unsung American heroes of the 369th Infantry Regiment of World War I in The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage. At a time of widespread bigotry and racism, the African American soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment put their lives on the line in the name of democracy.
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Great Accessible History
- By Christopher on 02-21-21
By: Walter Dean Myers, and others
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This Kind of War
- The Classic Korean War History
- By: T. R. Fehrenbach
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 24 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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This Kind of War is a monumental study of the conflict that began in June 1950. Successive generations of U.S. military officers have considered this book an indispensable part of their education. T. R. Fehrenbach's narrative brings to life the harrowing and bloody battles that were fought up and down the Korean Peninsula.
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Great narrative, frustrating redundancy
- By Ted on 08-16-10
By: T. R. Fehrenbach
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Vietnam
- An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, Peter Noble
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the US in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.
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A more nuanced view than Ken Burns' companion book
- By Vu on 10-21-18
By: Max Hastings
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The Face of Battle
- By: John Keegan
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In this major and wholly original contribution to military history, John Keegan reverses the usual convention of writing about war in terms of generals and nations in conflict, which tends to leave the common soldier as cipher. Instead, he focuses on what a set battle is like for the man in the thick of it.
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Amazing! But probably better in print.
- By D. Martin on 04-20-13
By: John Keegan
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Snow & Steel
- The Battle of the Bulge 1944-45
- By: Peter Caddick-Adams
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Tim Reynolds
- Length: 31 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Between December 16, 1944 and January 15, 1945, American forces found themselves entrenched in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg defending against an advancing German army amid freezing temperatures, deep snow, and dense fog. Operation Herbstnebel - Autumn Mist - was a massive German counter-offensive that stunned the Allies in its scope and intensity.
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fascinating and thorough, painful narration
- By richard on 01-05-15
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Vietnam
- The Australian War
- By: Paul Ham
- Narrated by: Peter Byrne
- Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.
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Fascinating detailed account
- By Alan T Alcock on 04-21-09
By: Paul Ham
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The Great Gamble
- The Soviet War in Afghanistan
- By: Gregory Feifer
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior number with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadership initially saw the invasion as a victory, many Russian soldiers came to view the war as a demoralizing and devastating defeat, the consequences of which had a substantial impact on the Soviet Union and its collapse.
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Correction
- By Alyssa B. Goss on 11-22-09
By: Gregory Feifer
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My Fellow Soldiers
- General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War
- By: Andrew Carroll
- Narrated by: Andrew Carroll
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Carroll's intimate portrait of General Pershing, who led all of the American troops in Europe during World War I, is a revelation. Given a military force that on the eve of its entry into the war was downright primitive compared to the European combatants, the general surmounted enormous obstacles to build an army and ultimately command millions of US soldiers. But Pershing himself - often perceived as a harsh, humorless, and wooden leader - concealed inner agony from those around him.
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Don’t pass this up
- By PineappleSmoothy on 03-29-18
By: Andrew Carroll
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The Generals
- Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II
- By: Winston Groom
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated historian Winston Groom tells the intertwined and uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall - from the World War I battle that shaped them to their greatest achievement: leading the allies to victory in World War II.
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Nothing new here
- By Mike From Mesa on 01-13-16
By: Winston Groom
What listeners say about The Gun
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sonny Schovanec
- 01-11-22
absolute must
must read for Cold War history nerds like me and those interested in history. This book is much more then a history of a gun hit sheds light into the inner workings of the Soviet system, life under Stalin.
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- S. Anderson
- 03-02-12
Good but not great
The material is awesome but the length and the dryness of the narration had my mind wandering around a bit. Still a decent read and great history of the guns that helped shape the modern world.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-23-20
outstanding historical account, beautifully writte
this was an exceptional work of research and lyrically written. comprehensive engaging, and deeply informative.
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- David
- 09-25-11
The Gun-C.J.Chivers
Well written and insightful. I don't believe the AK 47 was souly the work of the Russion Sargent who's name it bears, but the book is good reading anyway. By 1943 the German army had developed and were using a weapon that bears a suspicious (and down right striking resemblence) to the AK. I have fired this gun and it is everything advertised-simple-reliable-cheap to produce-readily available-and a killing machine.
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- Scott
- 01-09-11
Scattered
Downloaded this after reading a rave review in a news magazine. While some parts are interesting, including the history and rivalries in the development of machine guns, I found the narrative a bit scattershot (no pun intended) and not all that captivating. Will probably only appeal to those with a real interest in firearms.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Martin E.
- 09-10-20
Informative, half gun, half battlefield history.
Great info on machine guns leading to the ak. Great info on the first AR. Kind of dry material and lots of battlefield history.
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- Justin Sluka
- 04-26-22
A solid history of the machine gun and AK
What this book does REALLY well is tells the story of the history of the automatic weapon in a military context - from Richard J Gatling's Gatling gun, through Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-pattern of rifles. It's packed full of mechanical and strategic detail I've never known about, and generally was exceedingly enjoyable.
My one criticism is that the book falls into the same trap that most other firearms histories tend to fall into, in that it has nothing good to say about the AR-15/M16 and the debacle that was the US Army's first deployment of the rifle. While certainly a good chunk of the details shared by the book are authentic, it makes the singularly bold claim that Project AGILE was solely focused on the AR-15's role in jungle warfare - a gross reduction of the Project's overall objectives. It certainly reduces the credibility of the claims made about the M16.
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- Dad
- 05-09-16
CJ Chivers will have much to reveal to us...
I am very grateful to CJ Chivers for recently removing himself from the blind hazard of war. Although almost no one is better equipped to deal with hazard, he has seen fit to return from "the ranks of death" to focus his prodigious skills on we know not what. This is a rare talent which has been gifted us. I wonder what this surprising man will have in store for us. Whatever it is, I an certain that, like "The Gun", it will be a great deal more than the sum of its parts.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Peter
- 06-09-12
A Marathon Work Well Worth Absorbing
Would you consider the audio edition of The Gun to be better than the print version?
Cannot compare; never read the ink on paper version.
What did you like best about this story?
The personal anecdotes about the principle characters were nice and made the book's value far greater than if it were just a history of mechanical devices. Far far overshadowing the basic histories of the fully automatic weapons was Chivers' stark revelation of the corruption around the creation and implementation of the M-16 rifle and the fact that so many men died or suffered catastrophic life-changing injuries and PTSD because of the well-known defects that were buried under marketing hype and self-protective lies by manufacturers and military officers, alike. Chivers' revealing that most M-16's in the early years of the Vietnam extravaganza were so flawed and so unreliable that many of our troops demanded to use the heavier/older M-14 or they actually picked-up the fearsome weapon of the enemy (the AK-47.) OUR own troops were so terrified of their own weapons' flaws that they ended-up using the enemy's own weapons because they wouldn't jam and make them sitting ducks in firefights. If more people knew about this travesty and that so many of our young men died because of business decisions, many things about the way today's "wars" are conducted would be scrutinized and made subject to accountability than we see now.
What does Michael Prichard bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
His pace and use of foreign accents made his reading amplify the mere words the author wrote.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
"Genius So Efficiently Applied to Causing Tragedy"
Any additional comments?
The author did excellent work in crafting a book that stands alone as a documentary to the development of weapons which have changed our world...for the worse, unfortunately. Yet, we need to know. Also I love the quote; "Traditions and bad ideas die more slowly than do men" because it is so true and so evident almost everywhere one looks.
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- Gotham
- 10-07-19
Detailed and Informative
I learned so much about the history behind the early Gatling and maxim guns and then into the detailed and sordid history of the M16 and AK lines.
There was so much context and thorough examination that I now understand why the AK is the de facto choice for many armies, revolutionaries and terrorists.
Highly recommend!
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