Book Review: The Evolution of Military Automatic Pistols
Forgotten Weapons
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4m 10s
Today we have a book with a wider appeal than most, as it covers a broad range of different gun designs and has lots of good information for both the very technical collector and the casual pistol enthusiast. It's Gordon Bruce's new book, The Evolution of Military Automatic Pistols: Self-loading Pistol Designs of Two World Wars and the Men who Invented Them. What Bruce has put together are short biographies of twenty five automatic pistol inventors/designers - the individuals behind the automatic pistols that shaped the industry from the very early (Borchardt, Mannlicher, Browning, etc) to some that are still widely available today (Tokarev, Barthelmes, and Marengoni, to name a few). Most authors and resources focus on the guns and leave out any discussion of the the inventors behind them, and it's interesting to find out about the lives of these men, and their other paths through life. This is a perfect book for someone who is interested in different gun designs on a wider scale, not looking for the minute details of variants on a single design.
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