A competent if routine 'coffee table' book for military history buffs, and very well-presented with great photographs and illustrations. It was because of this quality that I felt suckered into buying it on one foray into Waterstones, even though I prefer uniqueness and flair in my reading material and was aware of the usual limitations of Osprey books in this regard.

Author Chris McNab provides a brief overview of 100 weapons throughout human history, from flint axes through to Reaper drones, and charts the considerable progress man has made in killing other men over the millennia. There are no real surprises among McNab's choices for the 100 weapons to chart this progress, though I wish each entry had been a bit longer. Each weapon is given only three or four pages maximum, on short A6-ish size pages (at about 6 inches x 6 inches), including some full-page photographs. Consequently, McNab only has about four paragraphs to summarise each weapon and tell us its historical impact.

That said, I do have some opinions on the choices, as you would expect from any source that presents a list-based selection. It is quite top-heavy, focusing on 20th-century developments. This is perhaps understandable due to the massive technological leaps forward and the increasing specialization/professionalization of military forces, and my point here is more a continuation of my criticism of the book's brevity: I wanted to know more about pre-modern military cultures than the vagaries of 'the chariot' or 'the bow'. I was also surprised that there was no entry on napalm or the sniper rifle or the Winchester repeater (I'm sure more examples will come to me later), but I suppose '100' is a nice, round number. And considering the book ended with the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), why not be even bolder and include cyber-warfare entries like the Stuxnet virus?

Particularly in the 20th-century choices onward, it is also rather US-centric. Again, this is understandable considering the United States' wealth and the size of its military industry and development, but sometimes it seems unnecessary. For example, McNab notes that it was the Russian BMP-1 which changed the game" for armoured personnel carriers (pg. 364), but instead of having the BMP as one of his choices, chooses instead to note this influence in the entry for the later M2/M3 Bradley, a US vehicle. Furthermore, some of these 20th-century entries are also dangerously close to just being a list of various technical specifications and impenetrable acronyms.

Nevertheless, all told it was an interesting book to quickly browse through. It is, after all, a so-called 'coffee table' book and, seen from that correct perspective, it fulfils its remit admirably." ( )

From military history specialists Osprey Publishing , A History of the World in 100 Weapons tells the stories of the hundred definitive weapons whose effects have been the most revolutionary, changing the way war is waged and the very world we live in.

From military history specialists Osprey Publishing , A History of the World in 100 Weapons tells the stories of the hundred definitive weapons whose effects have been the most revolutionary, changing the way war is waged and the very world we live in.