Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine - Softcover

Wright, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142001910 ISBN 13: 9780142001912

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2003

Synopsis

An illuminating foray into the war machine that has dominated military theory and practice throughout the twentieth century explores the tank as a cultural and social object, revealing how the tank became the symbol of technological futurism and inevitable progress, as well as of totalitarian oppression. Reprint.

About this title

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. Tank is Patrick Wright at the very top of his form - witty, illuminating and astute. Not just a military history, his book is a tour de force, a cultural history of our dreams and delusions.' - Simon Schama. 'A completely fascinating history: shrewd, wry and fiercely intelligent.' - William Boyd

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0142001910
• ISBN 13: 9780142001912
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512