Chris Kyle's examination of the place of weapons in our culture arrives at just the right time.
American Gun By Chris Kyle HarperCollins 320 pp.
EnlargeReviewed by Melissa H. Pierson for Barnes & Noble Review
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There has never been a better moment to launch a literary examination of how American history has been shaped by the guns we've used. Or maybe the time has never been worse. The gun, symbol and reality both, has become in past months the most divisive agent in the ongoing debate about who we are and where we're going as a nation.
It is beyond germane that the author's life and recent death ? at the wrong end of the weapon he mastered and revered ? concisely summarizes both sides of a vexatious argument and, for good measure, puts a fillip of anguished irony on top. Chris Kyle had not yet finished writing this paean to the instrument with which he was murdered last February. He had no way to know that with American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms, he? was inscribing his own memorial, one that will always in some way remain incomplete.
By now only someone who has been on a long vacation in a foreign land with sorry connectivity (here we exclude Iraq) is not acquainted with Kyle, decorated Navy SEAL and the deadliest sniper in US military history (160 confirmed kills and likely far more than that); bestselling author of last year's "American Sniper"; the subject of extended articles (including a somber e-single by Anthony Swofford, a former Marine sniper uniquely positioned among journalists to consider Kyle's life and untimely death); and soon to be played by Bradley Cooper in a Spielberg film. He was not exactly bigger than life, but his outlines were more distinctly inked than nature usually draws. His death is only now adding chiaroscuro to the image of a superhero.
From boyhood he owned and loved guns, for hunting and general boy-play ? "I love lever-action rifles... I lusted after [brother Jeff's] Marlin .30-06 when we were kids. I had a fine bolt-action .30-06, but his lever-action Marlin looked to me like a cowboy gun, and in my mind that made it the best" ? and it is this enthusiastically sensuous regard for the object that permeates "American Gun."
The allure of the weapon, its efficiencies and action and sound and smell, is inseparable from its terrible power; it belongs to that class of manmade phenomena a friend of mine has termed "charismatic objects."? These are fast and dangerous, elegant and complex, functional and art. At its heart the gun (or the motorcycle or the airplane) embodies a paradox: its satisfactory utilization calls for a still focus, the world distilled to here and now, but the fire that results from such Zen purity has been stoked with the full knowledge of its awful purpose.
The psychic heaviness of the piece is an analogue to its physical heaviness (and guns are always heavier than you think, notwithstanding Kyle's frequent observation that this or that gun is "light"; weight is obviously relative for a man who has undergone the ruthless physical conditioning of SEAL training and who has "humped" guns hither and yon for most of his life).
His glee in shooting ? describing it, recounting others' doing it, and especially the results of doing it, death as ultimate hobby ? is palpable, and almost childlike. He mentions that the AR15's full rack of custom options (grips, sights, trigger systems) have made it "a Barbie Doll for guys" but as usual does not comment on the implications: No matter how much cash you spend to bust the doors on Barbie's closet, no one could die from it. "American Gun" is a book for sympathizers, not questioners.
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/7zn7Zhn5Qgg/American-Gun
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