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Rating: 
Summary: Mostly For The Hardcore But ...
Review: Ian Hogg's MACHINE GUNS is a history and survey of machine gun
technology, covering the roots of the technology in the Gatling
and Maxim guns, along with their contemporaries, then moving
through various periods of refinement and surveying the weapons
made in those times. It covers the spectrum from light machine
guns to heavy cannon, though it does not cover heavy cannon in
much detail, and ignores submachine guns and assault rifles
(except for light machine gun derivatives of assault rifles).The first thing to say about MACHINE GUNS is that it is written
for the hardcore gun ethusiast or "shooter" in mind. It gets
into a goodly amount of detail of mechanisms, and has sections
describing how to break down various famous weapons, such as
the Browning Automatic Rifle or the Lewis Gun. As I am not a shooter myself, this means MACHINE GUNS was talking
over my head at times. I don't own any guns and I am not likely
to ever have the opportunity to get my hands on a Lewis gun, much
less strip one down. It is of course not reasonable to complain
that a book is written for another audience, but it is a warning
to readers who might not be in that target audience either. There are still some other weaknesses in this book. Mr. Hogg
throws a lot of weapons at the reader in a hurry, which gets
confusing, and items such as "evolutionary charts" or comparison
tables might have made matters clearer. He also tends to get
into "armwaving" mode when describing gun mechanisms, which a
shooter might be able to follow, but it would still have been
nice to provide more diagrams to actually show what was going
on. Those that were provided were very enlightening. There are lots of very nice illustrations, though this book
is printed on catalog-quality paper and they're mostly not
real spiffy, except for a good section of color photographs.
It was also a bit frustrating that the the illustrations
were rarely even close to pages describing them. It is
admittedly difficult to arrange illustrations more neatly,
but it might have been better to consolidate them
in sections so they could be located more quickly. OK, now I'm getting really picky and I have to back off, because
for all that I found this book interesting and entertaining. It
might have been over my head in some ways, but I could skim it
for what I wanted, and if it could be a bit more structured and
spiffy, I found Mr. Hogg's conversational writing style
enjoyable. I certainly couldn't complain that the book lacked
meat. I think a shooter would like this book. Somebody who's just
interested in weapons in general might want something a little
less technical, but it can still be interesting to such a reader.
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