AK-47 gives a firearm way too much credit for transforming how war is fought. If the author's main premise of his book was correct, the Soviets, who were armed with AK-47s, should not have lost in Afghanistan. The author points to other recent wars or conflicts to support his premise, but in every case he comes to the wrong conclusion because his basic thesis is completely flawed.

What has changed is that war in recent history is no longer waged between massive armies of warring nations. Nor is the goal of war the occupation of territory as it had been in previous wars like World War II and World War I. The strategy employed in recent conflicts is the war of attrition perpetrated by forces, though much weaker in firepower, have the advantage of not being in uniform and difficult to identify as the enemy. It's not AK-47s that have bogged the US down in Iraq and it was not AK-47s that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Nor is the strategy of war of attrition new. George Washington used this strategy in waging the American Revolution. Washington knew that he could not hold territory against the much larger and better-armed British armies and instead adopted a strategy of engagement and retreat. It ultimately became too costly for Britain to continue the fight.

I do agree that the proliferation of firearms around the world by the Soviets and China have contributed significantly to the instability of third world nations. This was indeed a deliberate strategy of the Communist nations to destabilize Western nations. But it is the fact that there were large industrial nations willing to supply insurgents with vast amounts of cheap firearms that's important. It was not because the weapon was the AK-47. Sure the durability and ease of use of the AK-47 was helpful, but it was the fact the AK-47 shoots bullets like any other gun that really matters.

I wish I would have read the reviews before I bought. The author expresses two thing extremely well. He knows NOTHING about firearms in general and the AK's in specific. He does not know an AK from an SKS. The second thing that he makes very clear is that he thinks America is the cause of all problems in the world. He thinks that people are faultless and that an inanimate object does terrible things on their own.
The book was a terrible waste of paper and ink. If anyone wants one of these, contact me and I will give you a hell of a deal on this piece of trash.
If you hate America and think machined steel parts make decisions to do bad things on their own, then this book is for you. As for me, I am only sorry that it was not printed in a little larger format. You see, the pages are just too small for the bottom of a bird cage.

I was disappointed. This book was initially well-written but rapidly devolved into the world of make-believe. Technically, some of the observations the author made were accurate and even relevent but towards the end it descended into some bizarre bashing of U.S. policy regarding gun control... the United Nations could have stepped in and provided controls over the distribution of AK-47s around the world if only the Bush adminsitration had been on board. This alone is an absurd statement. If someone can tell me of a successful UN initiative over the last 50 years I would be glad to listen to it. In the meantime, the UN's role in the sex trade in Africa and its abysmal record in limiting nuclear proliferation makes it a poor model for fixing the problems of the world.

The book is remarkably under-illustrated, even in regards to some graphics and photos which would be easy to acquire. Oh, and the part added to the book about how the Coalition is getting its butt kicked in Iraq thanks to the AK-47 just seems to be a last-minute attempt to cash in on "hate America."

There better books.

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.

The other reviewers have pretty much covered the book's faults in detail, but allow me to jump in:

The author's casualty figures are inaccurate, his reporting of so-called 'assault rifle' crime in the U.S. is very overstated (in fact, the class of weapons accounts for a tenth of 1% of violent crime), and he casually labels the weapon at cause for violence and hatred throughout the world.

He doesn't waste an opportunity to impugne conservatives, and laud such luminaries as Senator Dianne Feinstein, who, while mayor of San Francisco, piously turned in her .25. She kept her .38 and concealed carry permit, however.

I am returning this book, and my mind is poorer for having read it.

This book was widely hyped at it's publication. I eagerly waited to get a copy. I am a recreational shooter, hunter and weapons collector. This book is more of an extended editorial on the evils of modern weapons than it is a historical account of probably the most mass produced firearm in history. Rightly or wrongly, Kahaner demonizes the devil horned weapon while almost admitting that the machete is just as effective as a killing tool. Kahaner is not a technical writer or a "gun scribe" and it shows. There are some basic ballistic facts that he gets wrong such as the weight of a bullet versus it's usable range and trajectory.

About half way thru this book I realised I should have been taking notes on passages that were either flat out wrong or questionable so that I could have researched them further.

This is a quick read with a decent amount of factual history of the gun and it's designer. It is what it is and nothing more.

While valuable for the research into the life of Kalishnikov and the development of his legendary weapon, this book's take on the AK-47 is distorted by the author's own personal take on the Cold War, Vietnam, and the world in general. The individual chapters dealing with different regions and conflicts are plagued with a variety of subjective judgements and downright biased summaries which drag what could be a well-researched if technical account into an overly simplistic, poorly-written popular history.

This book was not bad overall. It's a good book to familiarize yourself with not only the AK47, but with 20th century irregular warfare in general. It has a lot of good facts, but makes a lot of conclusions that I disagree with. For example, the book says that "[f]or all the billions of dollars spent by the United States military on space-age weapons and technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet." Tell that to the massive, AK47-armed Iraqi army that got overwhelmed in a matter of days in Desert Storm.

While reading this book, I got the really strong message that the author is against civilian ownership of firearms. I also got the feeling he wouldn't mind the U.N. deciding our civil liberties for us. He seems to blame all the armed conflicts in third world countries, solely on the availability of AK's.

He paints gun owners and gun organizations with a broad brush. Making them seem like unthinking selfish people. Meanwhile he makes the Brady campaign look like they walk on water.

He never tackles the problem that bad guys are going to get guns no matter what the laws, because criminals don't follow laws to begin with. Otherwise they wouldn't be criminals.

He makes it seem like police officers were afraid to go to work before the assault weapon ban, or like there were gangs armed with AK's on every corner.

At one point he mentions a shooting incident where school children were killed by an SKS. He states that the SKS is a model of AK! They are completely different guns with no interchangeable parts. This is a blatant mistake I'm surprised no one caught, though they may have left this in on purpose, as it adds to the anti-gun agenda of the book.

He blames the ineffectiveness of the assault weapon ban on the law not being strong enough, rather than the real reason; that it only affects law-abiding citizens, not the criminals.

He puts AK's up there on the same level as Nuclear weapons, making them the bane of the earth and all civilization.

Overall, I am very disappointed, and sorry I wasted my money.

I was intrigued by the bold title and hoped it would give me some new info or a new version of the story, or perhaps some cool technical info... I found quickly that it was written by someone who knows VERY little about guns, and who uses the book as a bully pulpit to spout his political views, and spends the entire book giving a mechanical thing (the AK) a supernatural power to create and WIN wars. The authors lightweight analysis of complex political situations are basically superficial at best, spouting the typical liberal view "guns are bad in the hands of civiians" route where ever possible. Most importantly, his lack of technical gun knowledge is laughable, with constant technical errors all over the book. "Bill Ruger's first invention was a 22 Long Rifle" --- anyone want to tell the author that 22LR is a CALIBER? Or tell him that Bill Ruger's first successful gun was a pistol? KNowing your subject BEFORE you write a book would be advisable, I would guess. I sure am sorry I bought this one, for sure. Oh well, please don't bother to buy this, you can have mine!

The AK-47 has given the world's poor and disenfranchised a license to kill. For more then half a century now, the AK has become the most ubiquitous weapon in the world. It has fueled insurgencies, revolutions and civil wars. Mr. Kahaner does a decent job in tracing the weapons' origin from the eastern front in World War II, to it's current iteration as a popular culture status symbol. The interesting thing about this book is that the people that bought it, are probably, if not gun enthusiasts, conservative gun rights folk. Mr. Kahaner's bias against guns does eventually color the latter half of the book, but when he just sticks to the facts and history, his analysis is usually on point. Overall, if you're expecting just straight facts surrounding the AK, then this is not the book for you, but if you're looking for the history of the AK in a global context with some liberal analysis thrown in, then definitely check it out.