THIS is a firecracker of a book. A quick trip begins in China around 1250, and ends rather ignominiously, in Europe around 1890, when gunpowder lost even its name to new explosives based on nitroglycerin.
Jack Kelly makes it all entertaining, larding modest portions of chemistry and ballistics with tales of Guy Fawkes and the DuPont family, which got its start in powder making.
Readers of Gunpowder get seven centuries of military history in the bargain, though it seems the author does not much like war
Gunpowder: A history of the explosive that changed the world
Atlantic Books…
