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

In The Middle of the Civil War, inventor and businessman Richard Gatling created the world's first working machine gun. He naively hoped that the overwhelming effectiveness of a multiple-firing weapon would save lives by reducing the number of soldiers needed to fight. (The scientists who would unleash America's atomic arsenal less than a century later would see things much the same way.) Instead, it kicked off a worldwide escalation in armaments and opened a path toward modern gunnery that leads all the way to the AK-47. Through her portrait of its misunderstood creator, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Julia Keller draws on her investigative and literary talents to show how the Gatling gun, in its combination of ingenuity, idealism, and destructive power, perfectly exemplifies the paradox of America's rise to a world superpower.