Offering a panoramic view of American culture during Colt’s life, Rasenberger covers everything from bad poetry and cholera epidemics to the politics of slavery and Western expansion. Along the way, he gives us a picture of technological change and the rise of industry. His book’s most important contribution of all: showing how this history was rooted in horrific violence and oppression.

Cleareyed and honest, Rasenberger portrays a complicated figure who combined real mechanical insight with a talent for hucksterism. His book has flaws, of course: overlong passages, too much speculation, an absence of endnotes in the print edition. (Rasenberger is posting them online.) A familiarity with recent scholarship might have produced a more sophisticated depiction of Native Americans’ shrewd responses to repeating firearms. But Revolver is rewarding biography, highlighting Colt’s place in the history of industrialization..

... a lively biography of Samuel Colt.

Rasenberger’s narrative is, to a surprising degree, the story of America in the first half of the 19th century. It overflows with relentless ambition, energy, entrepreneurship, ingenuity and wealth, and with deceit, fraud, jingoism and murder..

Rasenberger deftly brings to life the man and his times in this gripping biography that does admirable work updating scholarship about Colt. A derivative of the word revolver is also key to the story as Rasenberger covers the many revolutions in nineteenth-century America, from factories and changing business practices to Manifest Destiny and the battles that led to conquest from sea to shining sea to lobbying the government for contracts and patent protections. Rasenberger presents evidence documenting Colt’s many trespasses against Victorian morality; indeed, Colt clearly led a wild life. The result is a very lively and informative book for every reader interested in American history and all of the nation’s flaws and virtues..

... colorful and richly digressive.

As Rasenberger notes in conclusion, knowing all this about Colt won’t change anyone’s mind about guns, but his useful study certainly lends depth to the ongoing debate about them.