Customer Reviews

My Tank Is Fight!

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Great technical info, great vignettes, if you are interested in WWII weird tech, and how it might have been deployed, than this book is for you.

For the tech buff, there are good scale line drawings, and tables of specifications; for the action buff there are plenty of well done painting quality pictures, and fictionalized accounts of their use in the field. For both there are good potential timelines for deployment (if they had been deployed), and excellent commentary by the author.

My only complaint would be some of the aside jokes in the descriptions might be obscure or unnecessary to some of the more serious/ older readers, and may also date the book rather quickly.

All in all it is a good balance of technical and fictional, and is, in the end, very entertaining. A good read for the military buff who isn't proofreading Jane's or anyone who enjoys military fiction above the level of a GI-Joe comic book.

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.

What a great book. I actually ordered this book by mistake, thinking it was about dinosaurs, but I sure am glad it wasn't! It was filled with all kinds of illustrations of things from the book and if it's too long for you to read (it isn't), the back has a summary of what happens inside the book!

Hurry up and buy this book now before it is sold out and you're forced to pay $200 for it on ebay.

If you like WWII stuff, gadgets, and have a bit of an imagination, this book is definitely for you. Kind of blends a bunch of facts (which it does a good job of telling you what is true and what's not) with some fictional writing. I thought the fictional part would be a little hokey, but was actually very entertaining.

I bought My Tank is Fight at World Fantasy Con when I was looking for something to buy in the dealer's room. It appealed to my peculiar tastes: weird history, alternate history fiction, technical details of weapons and armor, and a good dose of humor. In other words, the same stuff you find in most role-playing game books these days (if you can find them). So in a rare move, I bought myself a brand-new book.

As weird history, My Tank is Fight does an admirable job of spotlighting the various weapons conceived for World War II that were impractical from the start. Divided into land, sea, and air, these devices are mostly from the Germans (with one Canadian/American exception), spawned from sheer desperation as the war waned. They can be categorized as two different types:

Bigger is Better: The same old boring weapon, only GINORMOUS. Beyond the cost of creating these monstrosities, they were too heavy to actually use (giant tanks can't cross bridges) or too obvious a target for the Allied bombers.

Combine This With That: Combining a tank with a plane, or a submarine with a tank. Yes, technically these devices could conquer two types of terrain, but they ended up being pretty terrible at traversing both.

As if all these historical details are too boring to keep an adult's attention span focused, the book has frequent jokes - some funny, some just plain sophomoric - wherein the author slips into first person. It's a little jarring, when the rest of the book is relatively somber.

Additionally, there are fiction vignettes highlighting Nazis, Russians, and an American reporter's experiences with these superweapons in an alternate history where they're actually created and used. The Russian sniper's story is interesting but too brief, with no satisfying resolution. The Nazi tank commander's story isn't really wrapped up, while the Nazi pilot's story is wrapped up but out of sequence, which muddles the narrative. Finally there's the American reporter, who is by far the most fun.

Spoiler alert as I dive into the conclusion of the book here...

Nazi Germany explodes a nuclear bomb over New York City. This seems to be taken very lightly in the fictional narrative, with the author indicating that "although the Americans wanted to immediately bomb Germany, cooler heads prevailed and they bombed Japan instead."

Sorry, I don't buy it. After America's experience with 9/11 and Iraq, a Nazi atom bomb detonating over New York seems like it would garner a much more ferocious reaction. Unfortunately, there's really not room for My Tank is Fight to explore the implications of this hugely history-altering event. The bigger news seems to be the cover-up of Nazi space exploration. In comparison to the massacre of thousands of Americans, giving a fig about a single Nazi still stuck on a German space station seems a bit trite.

Ultimately, My Tank is Fight is a breezy, entertaining read. I kept thinking, "this would be fantastic for a game!" - be it a role-playing game or a first-person shooter set in World War II, wherein the boss battles feature these preposterous super weapons. If you have an interest in alternate history or World War II history, but are too lazy to do any actual research, this is the book for you.

This is not the writing you would expect from this author. You'll probably find 50-60% of the inventions in here interesting. The rest are noteworthy only because of their stupidity or unprecedented scale. About half of the technical stuff is a bore and a pain to get through, and the jokes are painful, especially to a person who has read the author's writing before. Rather than actaully being funny, he usually just makes pop-culture references which are amusing, but usally not enough to even make you laugh. The vignettes after each description are great and I like how he ties them all together and makes the ending appropriatley dramatic. This book is enjoyable so I am giving it three stars, but since he advertised his book on his humor site and the two are vastly different writings, I find that it was sheer luck that I enjoyed this book and would not reccomend it to many of my friends. Hopefully he'll be more faithful to his readers next time and do what he is really good at.

As a longtime visitor to Something Awful I have grown to enjoy Parson's writing immensely. When purchasing this book I expected to read a light, humorous account of WWII inventions gone wrong. In reality, the book is a ponderous recitation of those inventions replete with plenty of mind-numbing technical details and absent of anything remotely resembling humor. Hopefully SA/Parson's next literary venture will help us forget this stinker.

I wouldn't say I was mislead, but when I bought this book I was expecting humor. This book is much more an in-depth technical look at WWII weapons than it is comedy.

If the technical specifications of TOTALLY OFF THE WALL WWII weapons will alone please you, then buy My Tank. If knowing the wing area of some failed flying fortress makes you feel like a better person, this book is for you. If you hate laughing and love the idea of a History channel documentary in text form, this book is for you.

The fiction parts of this book are also a sobering bore. Expect nothing more than nerdy spit-when-you-talk WWII fantasies from these sections.

If you're a Something Awful fan, don't you dare buy this book based on your faith in the author. Zack's writing in this book is NOT the same caliber of writing you see at SomethingAwful.com. I'm not the kind of person that requires humor on every page, I just need to be entertained. This book was not only completely devoid of humor, but it also managed to actually bore me.

This book is terrible. Nothing more interesting than you would find in a Wikipedia page. This book might be a good purchase if you are 12 or a mental defective.

What happens when you mix 19 mostly German, mostly secret weapons projects from World War II, with a semi-technical explanation of the system and what would have likely happened if the system had been fielded, along with a fictional vignette of the weapon in action, all done with a bit of off-the-wall humor? Surprisingly, in the case of "My Tank is Fight", by Zack Parsons, you get a fun to read book that both educates (although educates is a relative term when you're dealing with secret projects that in some cases didn't even get off of the drawing board) and entertains.

I got the book pretty much on a whim, and I have to admit that my expectations were fairly low. But Mr Parsons offers some good, valid analysis on the projects and provides a realistic projection of whether the system would have been successful. And the part I thought would have been the book's weakest part ... the fictional vignettes ... by and large added to the fun.

The projects are generally grouped into "Land", "Air", and "Sea" categories. While I'm fairly well versed in World War II history, a few of the projects were new to me and learning something about them was a pleasant surprise. If you're a World-War II buff, and are looking for something to put on your guilty pleasure book list, give this title a try.