A Book A Week - Week 20: Glock

This week's book:
    Glock - the Rise of America's Gun   by Paul M. Barrett

Grade:  B+

   'Cause I put away the shotgun, bought me a Glock
   Took a little trip to the funky weed spot...
   -- 'Hand on the Glock'   Cypress Hill

It used to be the Colt, the revolver that won the American West, but in this millennium the Glock has captured the mind and spirit of America.  And the Glock's Austrian.  You know, from that Austria, the country that brought us Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss, Otto Preminger,  Erwin Schroedinger.  Hedy Lamarr (look her up, seriously impressive).  Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Um... and... uh... Hitler.  Funny how things work out, isn't it?

This book is an examination of how one socially-awkward Austrian engineer founded and developed a handgun company that would eventually come to eclipse the most venerable American gun companies.  It's the story of masterful engineering, flawless marketing, smart people with seemingly no conscience, and a very, very large amount of luck.

The author is currently employed as a journalist with Bloomberg Businessweek, and prior to that worked at the Wall Street Journal.  So he knows how to dig, how to tell the complete story.  What he does not seem to know how to do is make his prose pop.  Make no mistake, it's a great read, but, it's no Detroit, and I have to measure this by what I've read before.
   Anybody out there read Vanity Fair?  I love that magazine, and it's certainly well-written, its articles well-researched.  But, man, those articles can be loooooong.  Same thing here.  I have no quarrel at all with the prose, or with the years of painstaking research that went into making this book a reality.  But it does read like an extended article, when it should read like a book.

The author spends a lot of time on how Gustav Glock came to establish his gun company, and how he researched and created the gun that bears his name. He also spends a lot of time on the initial years in the United States, when Glock made some very lucky and very strategic hires that would put his company on the map and grab the American mind-share* it has now.  There are great studies of the company principals, volatile personalities that were both the cause of and the victims of the Glock company's success in the United States.
   The author spends a lot of time on the early years.  A lot.  It was only in the last forty pages or so of the book that he reveals why a book published in 2012 spends such an inordinate amount of time in the 80's and 90's:  he lost access to Glock the company and Glock the man.

This is the reason for the B+ grade.  The subtitle is 'the rise of America's gun' not because that's a stylistic or editorial choice, but rather because the author doesn't have any resources inside the company after the mid-90's.  He admits as much, saying he'd been persona non grata for years, and was surprised by a call from one of Glock's sons after the book came out.  The author still ties up the story, bringing us into the present day, but with a bare fraction of the detail he was able to put into the first years.  I appreciate the effort and the closure, but I still felt cheated.

The Glock story is epic - the man's now a billionaire, largely from selling pistols to Americans - both in its (sort of) rags-to-riches story, but also in the object lesson of a man who was not at all careful about who he surrounded himself with, or did business with, or how he handled the fortune that seems to be slowly destroying his family.

I'd recommend this book to anyone, but especially to any gun nuts you know.  It's not the rah-rah Fox-News-friendly story they'd want, but it has a message they need to hear.  It's also, as I mentioned, a lesson that incredible success does not bring with it the intellectual tools or the emotional maturity to handle that success.  I think that's something a lot of people need to hear. 

* yes, I used the phrase 'mind-share.'  It's late.  I'm tired.

Next week:
   Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls   by David Sedaris
   Can't go wrong with David Sedaris, can you?