Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun by Paul M. Barrett

(Crown, $26)

Compared with the pistols of the past, the Glock is an “ugly duckling,” said Douglass K. Daniel in the Associated Press. But looks aren’t everything in the weapons industry, as journalist Paul Barrett makes clear in his “eye-opening” account of how a boxy, plastic-bodied semiautomatic became the most popular handgun in the world. Created in 1981 by an Austrian manufacturer who previously made door hinges, the Glock was less prone to accidental discharge and lighter than traditional handguns. Significantly, it could also fire 17 bullets between reloads. Inexplicably, Barrett never fully addresses how handgun violence in America has been affected by the Glock’s ascent. But anyone engaged in that debate will be enthralled by his look inside “the money machine” spawned by Gaston Glock’s technological breakthrough.

There’s “much more” to the story than the inventor’s initial innovations, said Daniel Horan in The Wall Street Journal. After convincing the Austrian army to switch to his sidearm, Glock expanded into the U.S. at a moment when law-enforcement agencies were hungry for greater firepower. Product-placement buys put the Glock in movies, and soon rappers were glorifying the guns in their lyrics. An embezzlement investigation at Glock eventually unearthed that the company had been secretly funneling money to U.S. politicians. No wonder the gun had become the weapon of choice among America’s urban police departments.

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“Gun enthusiasts and gun detractors will almost surely read the saga of Glock with divergent views,” said Steve Weinberg in The Dallas Morning News. The former “will see an upbeat tale of capitalism at its best” in Glock’s underdog triumph over established gun-makers. Critics, meanwhile, will focus on the carnage Glocks have enabled, from the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech to the mass shooting in Tucson last year that left U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded. Barrett’s own political views are never “easy to decipher.” But that might be one of the great strengths of this “authoritative” study.