My Hundred Guns

In My Hundred Guns, Jason Jones takes us on a highly personal journey through the world of firearms, concentrating on the classic era of military and civilian rifles, shotguns, and handguns. With his own rich collection as a touchstone (spoiler: it’s more like 150 guns), Jones explores the history and evolution of modern firearms, and the pleasures of owning, restoring, maintaining, and recreationally shooting them. Mauser, Lee-Enfield, Colt, Browning, Garand, Tokarev, Mannlicher, Schmidt-Rubin, Carcano, Savage, Glock, Kel-Tec … the major names and designs are touched on in this witty, well-informed, somewhat off-kilter pilgrimage. Jones also examines the guiding ideals of gun design and manufacture; the “Zen of firearms” and their maintenance; “gun guys & gals”; guns as pop-culture icons; and contemporary gun-control debates. Illustrated with over 100 images, My Hundred Guns features a wide range of resources, from books and quotes about firearms, to today’s online communities of gun aficionados. Links throughout take readers to online videos from “Lyudmila & Vasily’s Shooting Adventures,” wherein the author and his range companion, Sherry, shoot the classics for your viewing pleasure. My Hundred Guns is a unique, colorful, and entertaining account of the world of modern firearms, and one person’s (peaceful) obsession with them. Jason Jones is a writer, educator, and photographer based in western Canada.

In this powerful memoir about three generations of New York City policemen, Brian McDonald chronicles a hundred years of dedication, disillusion, heroism, and tragedy behind the blue wall of silence that separates a cop from the rest of the world. His grandfather, Thomas Skelly, entered the department in 1893, when the NYPD was little more than a brutal gang of organized enforcers and Tammany Hall a corrupt political machine that could make or break an honest cop's career. His father Frank's career would span World War II through the 1960s, taking him from street cop to squad commander of the Forty-first Precinct. Better known as "Fort Apache", it was a place from which few cops emerged whole. His brother Frank McDonald, Jr., went on to become a decorated officer, waging an undercover war on drugs and crime. From turn-of-the-century Brooklyn to the South Bronx in the 1970s to the bedroom communities of upstate New York, My Father's Gun combines a rare and intimate family story with turbulent social history.

Originally published in 1930, these are the remarkable memoirs of Brigadier General Christopher D'Arcy Bloomfield Saltern Baker-Carr (1878-1949), a British Army staff officer who went on to rise through the ranks to become an important military commander during World War I. His account begins in August 1914 with his departure for the front in France and concludes four years later with his experiences at his last headquarters, situated in a small town in northern France, Caudry. “It was my unique privilege during the Great War to be closely associated with the development and organisation of the most important defensive weapon, the machine gun, and of the most important offensive weapon, the tank. “Today, perhaps, it will seem incredible that the High Command failed to appreciate the true value of the machine gun and the tank in the early stages of their development. It will seem even more incredible that, at a later period, it was necessary to scheme and struggle against official lukewarmness, at times almost indistinguishable from hostility, in order to secure the increase in the numbers of these arms, which, as was evident to everybody else, had proved themselves to be the greatest preservers of life yet discovered. “In the following pages I have endeavoured to set down an account of the difficulties encountered, of failures and successes, of high hopes brought to the ground by lack of faith and vision, of the ultimate recognition at long last, of the superiority of machinery and metal over beef and brawn. “Much of what I have written, especially in the earlier portions of the book, is, of necessity, a personal narrative, and I have described events and occurrences as I, myself, saw them.”—Brig.-Gen. C. D. Baker-Carr