Anyone have good book suggestions?

rory_benson said:

eh i am almost finished with unintended consequences .... the writing is alright not great. there is good history in there but i think that most of us know at least most of what has been penned in there.
r

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I can appreciate that. It's a whole different ball game to read about something in a book rather than actually experienced the different things brought forth in the book.

I'm quite a bit older than you and can say that some of the stuff really hit home. Like going into the gun shop and the first thing that hit you was the smell of Hoppes. I remember that very distictly. Think I was perhaps 8 or 10 years old when my uncle took me to Kellers Gun Shop in New Britain, CT. The wood floors seems like a sponge for Hoppes and creaked ever so slightly as the oldsters creeked around. We actually went to Bannerman's in NYC and I couldn't beleive all the stuff there. Seemed like an E J Korvettes or G. Fox & CO. (read that as an olde timey downtown 5 to 10 story building) selling nothing but guns.

The part about the Solothurn 20mm on page 214? The year was 1959 or 1960. I begged my dad to buy that thing. I saw the ad in the back of a Popular Science magazine, it was also in the back of any American Rifleman magazine before 1968. It went for about $190 back then. Navy Arms had the same damn thing for $175, AP tracer ammo was $2.95 each or cheaper in quantity (case of 100 rds for $69). The cost of the ammo was the big "no" to my dad. He said a box of 50 rounds of .22 was only $.29 and I could do a lot more shooting. Ended up getting a Winchester 190 .22 auto ... sigh.

It makes a huge difference the way you look at "Unintended Consequences" when you're old enough to have actually lived a lot of the stuff. Most of the book brought back fond memories.

I'll have to pull it out again. My copy is a first edition signed by Ross at the Creek when it first came out. I had already done bidness with John and had bought a couple of submachine guns prior to finding out he was an author.

Much speculation has been around the net originally over who John Ross patterned Henry Bowman after. Every author does it and it was mentioned between the ancients, but I haven't found out... yet.