Book Review - Firearms: The Life Story of a Technology
Firearms: The Life Story of a Technology
Written by: Roger Pauly,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2008,
ISBN: 9780801888366, 180 pp.
Reviewed by: Antony Trentini
Firearms are obviously central to the Army—and are critical to the business of the Infantry and Special Forces. Roger Pauly’s book is an excellent introduction for those interested in better understanding the firearms used by the warriors of yesterday and today.
This book examines the history of firearms, and their development from the primitive ‘firelances’ of ancient China into the sophisticated assault rifles of today. Pauly has chosen a simple overarching framework to guide his study, examining the development of firearms by analysing their ability to increase range, accuracy or rate of fire over previous firearms. The history of firearms is fraught with many counterintuitive developments and historical oddities that can be difficult to group together in any meaningful way. Pauly’s organisational framework succeeds in developing and maintaining coherence despite this, and is clear and well justified.
In examining the actual firearms themselves, Pauly has managed to strike a fine balance, offering just enough detail to explain the devices in question clearly, but presenting it in sufficient depth to avoid oversimplification or triviality. Pauly’s writing style showcases these explanatory sections well, offering an easily digestible and sometimes humorous style with plenty of anecdotes to convey the reader from one span of technical detail to the next.
However, his style is also one of the few drawbacks of Pauly’s work as it does not lend itself well to efficient and effective division into sections. Firearms, therefore, is of accordingly limited value as a reference text. While the comparatively extensive index does alleviate this problem somewhat, the book’s chapters are fairly broad and thus of questionable value in identifying matters for future reference. Pauly’s treatment of referencing is similarly problematic, with many facts such as dates, names, technical descriptions and points of contention not specifically referenced. This makes his work frustrating to verify independently, as large parts of the text are not clearly referenced.
In essence, if taken as an introductory text to a subject that is thoroughly treated in other literature, these shortcomings can be overlooked. Students wishing to gain some benefit from this text should delve into more thorough works on the subject. This way, they can draw on Pauly’s book as a valuable source of historical context for the technical and factual minutiae that often fill other works on the topic.
