Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

I heard about this book from a good friend who heard about it from NPR. It is the story of how a handgun that was developed in Austria by a curtain rod manufacturer came to dominate the U.S. market and, more salaciously, of the various scandals that have rocked the company in the past three decades. Hit men, alcoholism, domestic violence, tax evasion, and embezzlement have never been more intriguing.

Paul Barrett did a phenomenal amount of research for this book, speaking with any number of characters – upstanding and shady, alike – on both sides of the pond to put together a comprehensive and relatively unbiased look at how Glock has grown and prospered in the 25 years since the guns first entered the American market. (Unbiased except for the tax evasion bit – it’s clear he thinks evading Uncle Sam is bad, and also that he is pretty incredulous about some of the poor management practices at the company. In fact, at times this reads as a case study, but a very, very good one.) Although it seems clear at times that he does not agree with the NRA, he does nevertheless articulate their arguments in accessible language so that even a gun-control advocate such as myself can say, “well, I never thought of it that way,” even if thinking of it that way still doesn’t bring me around to their side.

Overall, Glock, read like a book-length journalism feature story, which is high praise from a WSJ or Washington Post geek like me. I am very glad this book was recommended to me, as it’s unlikely I would have found it on my own and, at the end of the day, it really checked all of the boxes for me: thoroughly researched, well-written, engaging, and on a topic which I didn’t know much about and would otherwise be completely ignorant. Also, the scandals are about as much fun as you can have in high finance and international business…

To Conquer the Air

To be honest, I found this book a bit boring. James Tobin certainly deserves credit for his utter thoroughness in documenting the race to flight. While certainly concentrating the most attention on Wilbur and Orville Wright, he examines the earliest attempts at flight in Europe (which, to a man, ended with the death of the would-be pilot/inventor in his craft), the attempts of lesser known Americans to achieve flight (Samuel Langley, anyone? Octave Chanute?), as well as one of the country's best known and most beloved inventor's efforts: Alexander Graham Bell. And yet, by and large the book simply didn't hold a candle to Jim Rasenberger's America, 1908. (Even Thomas Selfridge's death as Orville's passenger is better told in the latter book, with Rasenberger foreshadowing the man's demise  - and Orville's later feelings of guilt - by quoting from correspondence between the brothers in which they lament how it would be better if Selfridge were out of the way.)

I did come away with a deep admiration and greater understand of what the Wright Brothers accomplished (beyond the end result of flying, that is). Tobin devotes great chunks of text to the many, many iterations of the "aeroplane," as the brothers called it, as well as the rather horrendous conditions at Kitty Hawk, where they frequently battled either sweltering or freezing temperatures and swarms of biting and stinging insects in addition to the obvious hardships of life in rural America 100+ years ago: the need to find, shoot, and skin your dinner before eating it, the necessity of building every structure by hand, and the lack of showers, toilets, and other conveniences. Clearly no one smelled fresh as a daisy or sweet as a rose. I was also struck by the clear-sighted view they had of their invention and it's capabilities. Tobin quotes relatively early correspondence from Wilbur in which he writes, "We stand ready to furnish a practical machine for use in war at once." Similarly, when witnesses of early flights asked what the machine would be good for, they received a single word response: war. Indeed.

Several times I considered abandoning the book as too dry, too slow or, as when Tobin were veer off to explore the efforts of some other unknown would-be inventor, too choppy. Yet, had I done so, I would have missed the descriptions of the flights over New York, the first time the masses saw an airplane fly. The following paragraph especially struck me, capturing the awe of a people and an age:

"On the Jersey shore, people saw the machine bank and sweep into a tight half-circle, then head away, back over the harbor. Now every skipper in the harbor opened his steam whistle. ... Just ahead lay a far greater hulk in the harbor. It was the Cunard liner Lusitania, outbound for Liverpool. ... The flying machine came on and flew just overhead, and the liner let loose with a volcanic blast of steam. A hundred feet up, the roar and the heat enveloped Will."

It seems fitting that it was the Lusitania in the harbor, saluting one new weapon of war and soon to be sunk by another.

The Food of a Younger Land

The Food of a Younger Land provides a fascinating glimpse back in time to the American of the 1930s (and earlier). The book, which is comprised primarily of original, unpublished manuscripts collected as part of a WPA project in the late 1930s and early 1940s (last submissions: December 11, 1941) is essentially a glimpse of what and how Americans ate in the opening decades of the 20th century. The impetus for the government collecting this information - and the project lasted for nearly a decade, beyond the whole Great Depression thing, was the appearance of bottled salad dressings in grocery aisles. As Mark Kurlansky, who really did a wonderful job of stitching piles of 70-year-old papers into a highly readable book, writes in his introduction: “What could better spell the beginning of the end than the manufacture of bottled salad dressing, a product that was so easy to make at home?”

In 1930s America, Italians ate ravioli and Mexicans ate tacos and these foods needed to be described in detail for anyone else. Ravioli, by the way, are “diminutive derbies of pastry, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned meat paste,” or at least that is how the WPA writer described them in the late 1930s. Also, tourists in Virginia who do not find the “Virginian foods” along the highway are advised to “knock at some farmhouse door, register [their] complaint against American standardization, and be served after a manner that conforms to the ancient rules of hospitality.” As Kurlansky notes, if that instruction isn’t evidence that this book is about a different country as much as different foods, I don’t know what is.

Given what people in this earlier version of America ate, it’s amazing they didn’t all die of coronary disease at age 35 (of course, I suppose one could make the same argument today)... Primarily, they ate meat and they ate corn. Baked, fried, broiled, and barbecued, they started with hearty helpings of country ham in the morning, plates of fried chicken at noontime, and slabs of beef at night. That, of course, is when they weren’t eating squirrel, possum, rabbit, bison, duck, venison, the intestines of any and all animal, or my personal favorite, beaver tails. Also beans, biscuits, and the omnipresent corn, as a vegetable, a bread, or often a gruel. Whatever Oregon Trail taught me, I wouldn’t have made a good pioneer.

If you’re curious about an earlier era in American history or how cuisine has evolved, I definitely recommend this book. The heartiest might even try a recipe or two (potato salad or breads most likely, unless you fancy trying your hand at pheasant or beaver, though I personally recommend against it). Seeing that I’m not much better in the kitchen than I would have been as a pioneer, I’ll stick to reading the recipes myself.