Illustrated Directory of Tanks and Fighting Vehicles: From World War I to the Present Day

I bought this for my 11 year-old nephew. It is a perfect mix of pictures and written information. He loves it.

I think that this book is a great reference of all the tanks that have been produced from WWI to the present day. It shows all the techinal info and history of the tanks.A great book for gear-heads and history buffs alike.

David Miller's "The Illustrated Directory of Tanks of the World" is a compact, easy-to-read, chronological guidebook to the weapon which has dominated land warfare since World War I. Featured are well over a hundred tanks of all nationalities with three times that many photographs and illustrations, and each tank is succintly described in terms of armament, armor, performance, and deployment history. All the major designs are here, including: *M-4 Sherman, the American workhorse of WWII *T-34, the innovative Russian trend-setter *The awesome Tiger, the most infamous tank ever *The mighty Merkava, Israel's contemporary "war chariot" *Sweden's turretless S-tank, a bold but failed experiment *England's dwarfish Scorpion, with a variant for every need *America's M1 Abrams, which thanks to its dominant performances in the Middle East and its lethal "silver bullet" anti-tank shell now reigns as the world's pre-eminent AFV *and dozens of other great and small vehicles from all over the globe and every major armored conflict.Sadly, the book is marred by a number of typos and editorial misques. These are generally minor but nonetheless jarring, and do detract somewhat from the book's overall authoritativeness. Even so, this is a tremendous value considering the sheer volume of information jam-packed into its 480 pages. Mr. Miller is to be commended for the work which went into such a project, and his book is an easily recommended purchase for any fan of tank design or armored warfare.

An excellent example of how small reference material should be written. Anyone with any interest in armored vehicles would do very well to have this book at hand. David Miller has well earned his place in the lists of good military equipment authors along with Ian Hogg and Kenneth Macksey. The book even covers the lesser known prototypes like the MBT-70 and the German pre-war experimental models. I only wish this easy to read and well researched style would be copied more often.

This is not the best reference book on tanks, but it is absolutely the best reference you'll find for under ten dollars! It is a small format, a bit larger than a paperback dictionary, but the book contains an amazing amount of information, and most illustrations are in color. If you want coverage of famous vehicles, like the Sherman tank, or the T-34, or the M1 Abrams, there are better specialty publications. But for obscure vehicles, this book is excellent. It helps decipher the myriad of new tank designs now coming out of China and the states that once made up the Soviet Union. It also gives coverage of hard to find historical subjects like Polish, French, and Italian armor in 1939-40. Think of it as an ilustrated tank dictionary.