Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine - Hardcover

Wright, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670030708 ISBN 13: 9780670030705

Publisher: Viking, 2002

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. 17,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Wright is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, U.K. His books include Living in an Old Country, A Journey Through the Ruins, and The Village That Died for England.

Reviews

Beginning with H.G. Wells's 1903 premonitions of tanklike creatures, Wright (The Village that Died for England) traces the cultural history of a kill vehicle variously called "behemoth," "landship" and even "Mother." Wright's exhaustive research offers a treasure trove of facts usually eclipsed in conventional military or technical histories. The early attention-getting potential of the creatures ("male" or "female," depending on their armament) during WWI was used to demoralizing effect on German troops and as a successful fund-raising tool by the British, whose "tank bank" war bonds proved popular. Such potential was not lost on subsequent champions of the ungainly machine in the interwar period, from the British tactician J.F.C. Fuller to the unholy trinity of Guderian, Rommel and Hitler, simultaneously the tank's greatest and most disastrous deployers. As authoritarian regimes rose, so did Western PR campaigns showing the tank as the symbol of liberation (from fascism and bolshevism), while paradoxically, Wright argues, the tank subsequently began to appear primarily as a tool governments use to control their own people. Wright, a professor of modern cultural studies at the U.K.'s Nottingham Trent University, also covers the suicidal heroism of Soviet women tankers in WWII and talks with Israel Tal about his singular design for Israel's Merkava. While the book's scope is somewhat skewed toward Britain, ignoring Asian tank development and deployment, the WWII Pacific theater and Vietnam, Wright brings vital social and microhistorical data to military history and fleshes out the story of one of the 2oth century's most powerful, destructive and highly symbolic creations. Photos. (On sale Apr. 29)Forecast: This book's iconic subject and cultural savvy should bring in readers who don't normally pick up military history. Look for sales to grow as reviews chime in; the book got great press when published in the U.K. in 2000.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From its first manifestation on the Western Front, when it looked like a trapezoid out of a Cubist painting, the tank has been a cultural symbol as much as a battlefield force. "A phantom of cultural imagination" Wright calls the tank, and he sets out to analyze the written material it has inspired, whether popular, artistic, or military. Wright's idea of writing about the tank-as-icon could have easily slipped into unreadable arcana, but from the start, Wright gains readers' attention by discussing the most celebrated tank image ever, that of the lone man confronting a tank column in Beijing in 1989. Within that picture ricocheted one aspect of tank-power--its "moral effect" of intimidation. Right up to his closing visit to the U.S. Army's tank center in Kentucky, Wright's ruminative narrative will rivet readers with its hybrid melding of military history with literary and popular writing on the topic. A sophisticated yet highly accessible book. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670030708
• ISBN 13: 9780670030705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 499