AMERICAN RIFLE A Biography By Alexander Rose Delacorte. 495 pp. $30 The title of Alexander Rose's marvelous book says it all: Although "American Rifle" is ostensibly about the history of a piece of machinery, a tool, a killing instrument, it is only in America that the rifle has become an ineradicable part of the culture and can be written about as if it were a living person. "My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother," runs an old hymn still memorized by both Army and Marine recruits. That hymn was ... (more)