My Tank is Fight is a pretty interesting book. It's not quite comedy, and it's not quite weapons nerd grade specs and charts, but rather somewhere in between. Imagine equal parts of History's Mysteries and The Daily Show and you've got a fair approximation of how My Tank is Fight is written.
Technical information ranges from fairly in-depth to almost nonexistant, as some of the contraptions featured in My Tank never made it off the drawing board (and for good reason). The technical area of each misguided project's section, appropriately titled 'Technical Mumbo-Jumbo' is in general well written, with Parsons injecting just enough levity to keep the non wargeek crowd interested.
Along with development history, specifications, and analysis, Zack also tries his hand at some historical fiction, adding small vignettes about the fictional deployment of these sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes laugh-inspiring, and universally idiotic devices. The vignettes are unfortunately rather disappointing. The bad ones simply made me want to skip to the next section, and the good ones left me disappointed because they were all too short. I wish Parsons had been able to better flesh out some of the narratives simply because it's hard to not be entertained by the cartoonish supervillainy of Hitler's 2,000 ton megatanks clashing with the Red Army on the eastern front.
If you're looking for an in-depth technical manual, My Tank will probably be something of a disappointment, same with if you're looking for 175 pages worth of Zack's patented internet humor. Instead, My Tank straddles the fence between the two. While it delivers neither in-depth wargeek fodder nor mountains of comedic gold, it manages to be a highly entertaining read.
