This is an exuberantly written book. Journalist and cultural critic Julia Keller brings Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, to life and makes clear how he, like other inventors/designers of weapons and agents of mass destruction (including Leonardo da Vinci and Alfred Nobel), convinced them-selves that their weapons and discoveries would reduce the likelihood of warfare between armies. As the Hartford Daily Times editorialized in 1852: "Men of science can do no greater service to humanity than by adding to the efficiency of warlike implements, so that the people and nations may find stronger inducements than naked moral suasion to lead them towards peace" (p. 28). How could this "quiet, gentle, buttoned-down business leader, a family man" (p. 28) have invented a rapid-fire weapon that became the precursor to the machine gun—a weapon that British prime minister David Lloyd George claimed caused more than 80 percent of battlefield deaths in World War I? That is the question Keller sets out to answer.
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