Sampson, Anthony. The Arms Bazaar. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 401 pages.

"The Arms Bazaar" is his critical history of international arms merchants. Beginning with founders like Nobel and Krupp, Sampson works forward through the postwar "military-industrial complex" to our contemporaries who have turned Lebanon (and now Bosnia) into arms marts, and laboratories. Along the way, Sampson details the subterfuge, bribery, and power politics that inevitably shadow the arms trade. Sampson emphasizes the difficulties of controlling this industry. But he acknowledges that "the ordinary citizen" is right to lump the arms trade in with the slave trade, and be appalled at both.

The son of a research scientist, Oxford-educated journalist Anthony Sampson writes elegant and exhaustively-researched books about powerful and often secretive elite groups: South Africa's white leadership, Britain's ossified elites, a multinational pirate corporation, the world oil industry, the international arms trade, international bankers. Without truckling, Sampson is able to get far enough inside such circles to show us how the world looks through their eyes -- while also providing a wealth of information that makes independent judgment possible.

-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-553-11655-X

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