Paul M. Barrett (1)

This was unexpectedly good book. Author manages to describe very vividly how unknown manufacturer of knives from Austria managed to create a high quality firearm that will change the small arms market forever.

Whatever people think of it, Glock was, is, and remains an excellent firearm. It took competition almost two decades to start creating copies so they can join the market. By the very definition it is dangerous but book clearly shows (no matter how anti gun people feel about it) that all issues come from training of users. Crime elements will always find their way to guns and any drastic legislation will only worsen things for ordinary people that want to protect themselves (recent anti-police etc movements are just throwing oil on fire and inspiring people on the other side of political spectrum to keep on arming, and cycle just repeats itself).

Book starts with the event that raised the demand for semi-automatic pistols, Miami shootout where, due to serious lack of organization, law enforcement suffered great losses in shootout with heavily armed criminals. Deciding that what they need is more firepower, US law enforcement agencies basically opened the door to Glock, and once opportunity was taken, Glock Inc never let it out of its hand.

Of course with the huge sales and money, lots of criminal activities started to pop up within Glock Inc, embezzlements and outright money theft. All of this coupled with the Glock Inc founder, very eccentric Gaston Glock and his family are the center pieces of this book. Author talks about the gun and reviews and experiences of some of the best international shooters (Glock had its drawbacks but still proved to be more reliable than the competitors) but gun is not at the forefront, it is always in the background while its effects on gun market and US society (as the largest market for small arms in the world) are what takes the scene.

Author touches on political decisions related to gun control, and even attempts to abolish personal gun ownership, and notes how dramatic and hysterical statements by activists (very like zealots that preached in a dramatic and hysterical way things very recently) basically undermined their own efforts. Once more history teaches that overly emotional approach to anything will backfire. Instead of relying on actual data and statistics that could prove useful to control the level of citizen armories, they fed emotional nonsense to their opposition, NRA. Insisting on the most known weapon manufacturers, picture got so warped that Glock was mentioned everywhere while in reality, due to price, it was almost not present on any listings of confiscated criminal's weapons. Also stunts with proving Glock is hazard for air transportation horribly backfired when it was found out that pistol was not more invisible to scanners than other models made in standard way (using more metal than polymer) and that findings are exaggerated. This just created more advertisement for the guns in general, Glock in particular.

I have to say that projects with refurbishing old handguns was something unexpected, but it does make sense. Guns treated as just another technical tool, same as old cars or electronic devices. I still think that cities and counties should have opted for destruction of old firearms but I guess that there is no money to be made in this approach.

In parallel with story about gun market and sales, we are presented how Gaston Glock accumulated immense wealth, crisis his family went through and how he (Gaston Glock) ruthlessly destroyed each and every opponent (perceived or real). This part of book reads like it was ripped from Dynasty or Dallas tv shows.

Excellent book presenting how appearance of unexpectedly very high performance firearm changed the industry.

Highly recommended.… (plus d'informations)

I read a galley copy that I received from the author, Paul Barrett, a couple months ago when I was up visiting New York City. I met Paul when he came out with his previous book, Glock. Since I know firearms, Glocks, forums, blogs, and social media, I helped show and introduce him around. I'm helping him again. And, as part of that, I read _Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett
Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who'd Stop at Nothing to Win_.

I know a lot less about what happened in Ecuador that I do about plastic pistols. That said, that helped since the non fiction book was a cliff hanger for me. I didn't ruin it by jumping on Wikipedia or reading Paul's reporting about the Cofán Indians v. Texaco/Chevron or spoiling it by looking at Wikipedia, so the subject was new to me.

One thing I notices about this book that was very much like _Glock_ was how balanced the reporting is. This book is going to piss off both the environmentalists as well as the free market capitalists as well. The sign of good reporting is that both sides feel slighted.

While this book is primarily an exploration of the cult of personality known as Steven Donziger, the larger-than-life, Harvard-educated, class-action lawyer who took an unwinnable David and Goliath case between the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio oil field case (the indigenous Cofán people) against Texaco (now part of Chevron).

Like any David v Goliath case, I thought I would be rooting for Donziger and his lieutenant Pablo Fajardo; however, both sides played for their lives and Steven Donziger was maybe a little too open and honest about what lengths he was willing to take to win the lawsuit.

At the end of the day, there were two heroes: Pablo Fajardo and the Rule of Law.

I also highly recommend watching the movie _Crude_ -- it's a documentary commissioned by Donziger and directed by Joe Berlinger -- it's amazing to put faces to names and voices to text after you've explored such a maddening international circus.

Hell, there's even a cameo by Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, as Steven Donziger brings world attention to one of the worst oil spill/environmental disaster, the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador.

I must admit, it took me a while to read the book. The book's beautifully written and is easy to read. Like I said before, it's balanced, journalistic, and even brings the author into the narrative (it goes from strikingly objective to rather personal); however, it still was a challenging read because I am neither a lawyer nor an environmentalist.

That said, it's amazing to see how the legal, judicial, environmental, and capitalist systems work, under the hood and when nobody should look (note: thing twice about commissioning an all-access documentary film crew if you have impulse control and tend to want to blurt morally ambiguous advice and offer no-holds-barred strategy that may well be how things are done in Quito but don't come across very well in US Courts -- just don't do it!).

I am glad I read the book. It changed me. As you might have guessed, I am skeptical and don't consider myself an environmentalist at all. I am also neither a lawyer nor a political operator. That said, I wonder where I have been hiding because I had not heard anything about this case at all -- and I wonder why. I guess I am in a silo.

That's the good thing about the book: I believe it'll be able to speak outside of and across the silos and echo chambers that tend to only preach to the choir.

Paul Barrett did the same thing with his book Glock: he wrote a book that transcended the pro- and anti-gun conversation.

The Law of the Jungle has surely been able to transcend both the pro- and anti-environmentalists and also the pro- and anti-capitalists, too.

I haven't read a book that has changed me as much since reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch by Jeffrey Birnbaum.… (plus d'informations)