by John Buckley
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by Patrick Wright
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by Walter J. Boyne
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by Correlli Barnett
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by Michael Smith
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Patrick Wright specialises in taking a specific, seemingly narrow subject for scrutiny, and opening it out into a survey of much wider horizons and concerns. A previous work of his, The Village That Died For England, took as its theme the remote, deserted village of Tyneham, Dorset, on the south coast of England, and turned it into a symbol of the entire history of 20th-century Britain: a quite brilliant achievement. And Wright is every bit as unexpectedly illuminating, challenging and broad ranging in his latest study, of the tank. From its lumbering debut appearance in the first full-scale tank attack, at Cambrai on the Western Front in November 1917, to the unforgettable image of the lone protester with his plastic shopping bag, holding up an entire armoured column in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the tank has always inspired awe, pride, terror and even a kind of desperate, hysterical laughter. In its future incarnations, the tank will become the cybertank, if the dreams of the boys at the US Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, Kentucky are ever realised: fully digitised, unmanned machines that will operate in a kind of virtual reality--except, of course, for the maimings and killings inflicted on human flesh, which will have a more old-fashioned kind of reality. Wright is acerbic, combative, powerfully perceptive about the tank as both machine and metaphor for the mechanisation of human life, and his long, hard look at this modern Behemoth, both fascinated and appalled, is utterly compelling. --Christopher Hart
Review
'Wonderful - witty, illuminating and astute. Not just a military history, this book is a tour de force, a cultural history of our dreams and delusions.' Simon Schama; 'An immensely readable, well-researched book, filled with interesting detours, unusual stories and idiosyncratic discussions relating the tank to philosophy, religion, art politics and even necromancy... A highly useful source of amusing and iconoclastic material with which to challenge orthodox military thinking.' General Sir Michael Rose, The Times
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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