The AK-47, or 'Kalashnikov', is the most abundant and efficient firearm on earth. It is so light it can be used by children. It has transformed the way we fight wars, and its story is the chilling story of modern warfare. C.J. Chivers's extraordinary new book tells an alternative history of the world as seen through these terrible weapons. He traces them back to their origins in the early experiments of Gatling and Maxim, and examines the first appearance of the machine-gun - a weapon that first created the 'asymmetric' colonial massacres enjoyed by the British in Africa but which then led to the nightmarish stalemate of the First World War. The quest for ever greater firepower and mobility culminated in the AK-47 at the beginning of the Cold War, a weapon so remarkable that, over sixty years after its invention and having broken free of all state control, it has become central to civil wars all over the world. The machine-gun reused many innovations associated with the new agricultura This superior history of the AK family of assault rifles begins with the invention of the machine gun by Hiram Maxim and traces automatic weapons through WWII. In 1947, Russian army officer Mikhail Kalashnikov adapted a German design of automatic infantry rifle to become the AK (for Avtomat Kalashnikov). It first attracted world attention in Vietnam by proving superior to the American M-16. Since then it has developed several relatives and been produced in many other countries, the total running into the hundreds of millions. It has armed regular armies, irregular armies, police forces, terrorists, common criminals, and ordinary householders in the majority of the world’s countries, creating a proliferation problem that has to date killed far more people than the nuclear kind. The author is a former U.S. Marine officer and prizewinning journalist who has written incisively and researched exhaustively. It lends force to his arguments that some of his informants have been assassinated with assault rifles for talking. --Roland Green C. J. Chivers is a senior writer for The New York Times and is a former Times Moscow bureau chief. A onetime Marine Corps infantry captain, he received a National Magazine Award for his reconstruction in Esquire of the terrorist siege in a Russian school and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage in the Times of combat in Afghanistan. His war reportage from Iraq and Afghanistan was selected by New York University as one of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade.