Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible Paperback – Illustrated, 24 April 2008

This book was recommended to me by a friend. This is a story of Viktor Bout,the biggest illegal arms dealer in the world.Bout is reported to have made substantial amounts of money shipping goods in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s, and the former military translator for the Soviet Union may well have fed the flames of various African civil wars by supplying vast quantities of arms during the Nineties. He has also been dubbed a “sanctions buster” because of allegations that he violated UN arms embargoes in trading with Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo during the same decade.

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible A great book and I appreciate the efficient service by RightChoiceBooks

This is a fantastic, albeit academic, book about Viktor Bout, the notorious international arms trafficker.The book also serves as a timely prologue to Bout's arrest and detainment in March 2008, an event that will likely be addressed in subsequent versions/publications of the book.

Very interesting read, would recommend for anyone in the business!

I really enjoyed reading this book. I read it for research I'm doing for a novel I'm writing that's based on the arms trade. The authors write well, it's entertaining, and the research is robust. Definitely worth the read.

A very interesting story. I couldn't put the book down until the end.Unfortunately, the editing, proofreading and translating/transcripting (especially of Russian or Ukrainian names) are very poor, which is a shame for such an interesting book.

I read this book about 3 years ago on a holiday to the states. Before reading this book I had no prior knowledge to who Victor Bout was. I am familiar with the various conflicts around the world e.g. Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq and more, and I discovered one of the main characters behind all of these war zones. He was a former intelligence officer, with the rank of lieutenant Cornell, for the former Soviet Union, who was fluent in various languages, and has a entrepreneur flair about him. He took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Empire, and through his connections in the Soviet army, bought up stockpiles of military weapons and equipment, and sold them around the world, to who ever had the money. And we are talking about on a grand scale here, Billions of dollars, over the course of 15 years. While the world authorities we playing a game of cat and mouse with him, he was completely untouchable! with protection from the the highest levels of the Kremlin. He actually created civil wars, he supplied the governments with tanks, helicopters, RP-Gs, Artillery pieces, and then went to the rival rebel groups and provided them with a equally, devastating arsenal of weapons too.And as time of writing (Jan 2011), Victor Bout has been arrested and extradited from Bangkok, Thailand to the U.S, after a operational sting by the FBI/CIA, posing as Colombian paramilitaries, requiring to buy a large assortment of Missiles, RP-Gs, etc, to fuel a fresh conflict in Colombia. That's a better story line than any Hollywood film could offer.I do not want to get into too many details of the book, and spoil it for you, but I do recommend this book, if you like a good, true story, with plenty of action.And finally The journalism of this book is not the best, but the story of his life compensates for that.

One of the few books I've ever read that I quite simply could not put down.