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AK47
The Story of the People's Gun
- Author: Michael Hodges
- Category: Non-fiction Current Affairs / Politics Narrative
- Publisher: Sceptre
- Pub date: 28 June 2007
- Length: 240 pages
About AK47
Since its inception in the late 1940s in Russia, the Kalashnikov rifle has become the most ubiquitous and successful killing machine the world has ever known. The United Nations has made a conservative estimate that there are 70-100 million of the weapons in existence today.
AK47 tells a remarkable story of the people’s gun, tracing it back to the birth of its inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov on a family farm on the Steppes of the Kazakstan-Mongolian border, through its many incarnations in many different countries and conflicts, to its current place as a potent symbol of revolution, liberation and terror around the world.
Hungary, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Breslan – you name the place, there’s a Kalash waiting for you. It is also the only gun in history to become a superbrand, its name adorning vodka bottles, T-shirts and mouse-mats. Unbelievably, you can now buy an MP3 player to slip into the ammunition magazine of your Kalash so you can listen to music while you kill.
About the Author
Michael Hodges is an award winning author and journalist. He is the holder of the 2008 Press Gazette Awards Columnist of the Year prize for his weekly Slice of Life column in Time Out and a former PPA British magazine Writer of the Year. Hodges was awarded the Campaign for Racial Equality Race in the Media Prize in 2006.
AK47: The Story of the People’s Gun has been translated and published in nine territories and was a New Yorker pick of the week. His biography KEVIN KEEGAN – Reluctant Messiah, was published in 1998 and again in 2007 (Pan Macmillan). His essays and sports journalism appeared in The Cult of the Manager (Virgin 1998) and The Best of the Season: The pick of British Football Writing (Ebury 1999).
Hodges also contributed to 1,000 Books to Change Your Life (Ebury, 2008) and Flight Free Europe (Ebury 2007). He wrote the chapters on drugs and on Ken Livingstone in London Calling – 40 Years of Time Out (Ebury 2008).
Hodges is a regular contributor to the Financial Times Weekend magazine and the New Statesman. His reporting from the war in Iraq and the conflict in Palestine has appeared in the Financial Times, Jack and Esquire. In 2008 Hodges was the launch editor of Time Out Beirut and he continues to work in and report from the Middle East.