It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a book on a handgun’s history would come out now. After all, C.J. Chivers’s The Gun, about the AK-47, not only sold well but also won the Pulitzer Prize. The story of the Glock is different. It came out in the early 1980s—not as a product of a Stalinist regime and not as a symbol of revolutions around the globe, but simply because the Austrian Army was looking to procure a new handgun made in-country. Mark A. Keefe IV, editor in chief of American Rifleman, reviews Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun by Paul Barrett in the Washington Post.

Writes Keefe,