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Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel - Publisher: Viking Adult
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 304
My appetite for biographies is minimal: in general I find focus in single individuals results in a necessarily circumscribed and correspondingly dull book, and therefore avoid them except in certain cases (Christopher Hitchens’ recent memoir, while not strictly a biography, counts among their number). Inestimably more interesting—and invariably more important as well—are general histories, either of periods or concepts.
Occasionally, however, an individual or dynasty serves as a synecdoche for said historical period or concept, and this is the approach that Julia Keller takes toward Richard Jordan Gatling, the 19th-century inventor who lent his name to the famous machine gun. In fact, Keller’s book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, travels along two separate threads; the first is Gatling himself and the era of innovation of which he was emblematic, but the second is the rich irony of Gatling, most proud of his agricultural machinery, becoming famous for instruments of death.
