Culture January 1, 1

This is a book about a contemporary phenomenon that is crucially important, utterly terrifying, and largely ignored. In AK-47: The Story of a Gun, Michael Hodges, a British journalist, charts the spread of the titular weapon—especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—and the ways in which the gun virtually guarantees the continued implosion of failed states and the intensification of terrorist violence. For thousands, perhaps millions, of people, the AK has developed “a cultural velocity” that has proved to be “both irresistible and catastrophic,” Hodges writes. It is not just a weapon but an unmaker of whole societies,