The latest publisher to enter the market for affordable armour photo references pioneered by Squadron/Signal and more shared with, among others, Concord and Osprey is Letterman Publications, a division of VLS.  One of the first titles in their new AFVisual series is this book on the M36 tank destroyer.

Printed in landscape format, this 50 page softcover book has a single colour photo of a restored M36 at Beltring, but otherwise contains black and white photographs.  After a very brief single-page history of the M36, the rest of the book gets to the nitty-gritty, with approximately 100 photos of M10s and M36s.  Aside from a few detail shots of (I believe) the ex-Yugoslav M36B2 at the WWII Vehicle Museum at Hubbard, Ohio, the rest of the photos are period shots and tech manual images. 

To me, the tech manual images are the highlight of this book, since very few of the in action shots were new to me.  There is the odd error in the captions (the vehicle in the photo on the top of p. 36 is a late M10, for instance, and the author repeatedly refers to the M36 as the "Jackson," which apparently was a name bestowed upon this vehicle by Tamiya in the 1960s!), and I wish the captions had contained more relevant information (units, locations, more precise comments on vehicle configurations and characteristics shown, etc.).  Also, a number of the photos (including some otherwise excellent shots of the turret interior) are of the T71 prototype, which has a number of differences from production M36s; hence, these photos may not be as useful to modellers as one might hope.  I also found the book to have a rather sparse feel, with a lot of white space on the pages that could have held more photos or perhaps more informative captions.

Overall, this is a useful title, especially for anybody working on Academy's M36, but by no means definitive.  If you already have Allied-Axis 12, Squadron's US Tank Destroyers in Action or US Tank Destroyers Walk-Around, or Concord's US Tank Destroyers in Combat, this book does not offer too much new information.  At $21.95 CDN, this book is the same size and format as Squadrons In Action series (without the colour profiles and drawings) but priced almost 50% higher, more in line with Concords Armour at War series, which has more pages, more photos, and 8 pages of colour profiles per title.  I would recommend this book with these caveats, and look forward to more books from this publisher (a title on the Zebra Mission has been promised!).