Tom Clancy Books

This, the first book-length critical study of Clancy's writing, examines both the work and the man who is reflected in it: his knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. In Clancy's eight novels, discussed and analyzed in separate chapters, we see both the emerging hero and the changing author. One of the most topical contemporary writers, Clancy has written of the Cold War, terrorism, the Vietnam War, the drug culture, and trade wars. Helen Garson's close examination of each of Clancy's novels helps the reader with explication of this wide-ranging and often difficult subject matter. Each novel is examined in its own chapter, with sections on plot development, characters, style, and themes. Garson also offers an alternative critical approach to each novel, giving the reader an additional perspective from which to read and analyze it. A biographical chapter discusses Clancy's life and career and the critical response to his work. A chapter on genre places him in the popular tradition. A complete bibliography of Clancy's work, critical sources, and a listing of reviews of all of his novels complete the work. Clancy's popularity with adults and young adults makes this an essential purchase for school and public libraries.

Ok, far as I could tell, this book is all about two things. Envy of the author, and trying to make light of all his values. Clancy obviously values the armed servants of his country high and I fail to see why this is cause for diverse derisive comments about him as a person.

Mind you, I haven't read all of this, I could't stand to. I think the Clancy books stand on their own, without anyone having to do their best clobbering him for his great writing.

Read a Clancy book and form your own opinion, don't buy this highly colored collection of defamatory sentences.

It's worth noting at the start that the Op-Center series was conceived (and probably overseen) by Tom Clancy, but not written entirely (if at all) by him. That said, whoever actually wrote 'Acts of War' does a reasonable impression of Clancy's usual military-political intrigue, but fails to achieve Clancy's crisp prose or well paced plotting.

Kurdish rebels seeking to destabilize the Middle East is the international issue du jour in this book, the third in the series featuring the invented (and wishful) highly flexible supra-intelligence-agency 'Op-Center'. Ham fisted exposition at the start coupled with continuity errors ('sadly we can't get infrared photos from that satellite. Oh, here are the infrared photos from that satellite.') made the first third of the book a slog.

The overall effect, as the team in Turkey and in Washington seek to discover and diffuse an ever mounting crisis, is clumsy and not Clancy. Once the book finally gets interesting - the descriptions of the crack military team planning and leaping into action are far and away the smoothest and most engaging part of the book - it undercuts itself with a tacked on and awfully exposited ending.

Middle of the stack beach reading.

This book was eloquently bad. The book started very slowly with the meeting of old friends that have a military record. They walk around South Korea for a long time, but nothing seems to happen. But in a matter a minutes, a political party is forming, a convention is going on, a bomb is detonated, terrorists are spotted and a full fledged murder, international affair is on stage. The only hope of stopping international war is a crack team of government members known as the "op center". The team battles along the way as the terrorists start killing key people. At the culmination, the center is infiltrated and a renegade group of the op center staff tours the world looking for the mysterious "eye patch", the man said to have been responsible for the bomb in South Korea. They follow him around and then end up killing him in an anti-climatic gunfight. (Don't worry that's not how it ends.)

The problem with the book is that it lacks any reality. It spends 40 pages on a dinner chat with a couple, which is mindless chatter. However, the bomb sequence is only one page. If you are looking for a long read, here it is. If you're looking for a big bang, keep looking.

I have at least liked nearly all of Tom Clancy's books. Most of them I thought were very good; several were excellent. I've enjoyed his books so much that I believe I own all his solo efforts, and most of those I have in hardback, including this book. Given that I find Tom Clancy to be a very enjoyable and readable author, I find this review difficult to write.

I would not recommend this book to a casual reader of Tom Clancy. Furthermore, for those fans that find the action in his books to be the most enjoyable part, I would say absolutely avoid this book. However, if you enjoy the sometimes-excruciating detail that Clancy can put into his writing, with minimal amounts of action, then this story may well appeal to you.

It took me quite a while to read this book. The beginning is filled with very fine detail that helps you to understand the characters involved and their various motivations. Much of the first half of the book almost reads like a pseudo-documentary of the various individuals and jobs involved in intelligence. Since my experience with Clancy is that he opens the book with a significant action sequence, then has at least one intervening action sequence, and then the final sequence, I kept looking for an action sequence. There really is very little action in this book. In spite of the lack of action, the last 200 pages finally caught my interest and I was able to zip to the end of the book from that point forward.

I will try to avoid any plot spoilers, just in case you find yourself interested in buying this book, so please read on.

The ending of the book I thought was relatively predictable. Unfortunately I can say little more without revealing things, so I'll just say that I was disappointed that the potential for disaster was there, and yet for the most part the flow was much smoother than what often happens in real life.

One particular characteristic of this book I found to be annoying. Ryan keeps telling various individuals that the source of his information was a defector. In real life, you never tell source sensitive information to anyone unless that person has a definable need to know. Ryan could have explained that his information was from a sensitive source that he couldn't reveal, but he believed the information was reliable. In the real intelligence world, such information is highly compartmentalized, and everyone knows and understands why. I believe this aspect of the story was a slip-up by Clancy; unusual for him.

The book is well written. The flow is logical and easy to follow. The only real flaw is the lack of action from an author known as much for his action as to his attention for detail. Had the author been any of a number of spy story authors, perhaps someone like Len Deighton, I might have had different expectations and read the book accordingly. However, this is a Clancy book, and I didn't get what I was expecting. The book is an okay read, but expect it to be very detail heavy and slow reading in the beginning, and the plot twists, such as they are, are minimal.

I first rented RS3 on GC but then bought it on PS2 and also picked up this guide. It provides so-so strategies, but on door assaults the writer needed to be reminded your squad is not invinsible! I think the writer played the game on veteran (normal) difficulty not hero (hard) so some of the tactics aren't right. It's weapons detail sucks at the beginning of the mission they just suggest the M16, you can't use that inside, just alcatraz. On Island Estate they tell you to use the silenced MP5, which is a great weapon but not fit for that situation. Your sole teamate uses the TMP which is a silenced machine pistol, a piece of crap. I suggest you use the M60E4 or M249, which are Light Machine Guns that mawl anyone at close range. All in all a horrible guide for a good game. As I said in my title it also helps for GC version who's campaign is the same in PS2

So Clancy would have us believe the Russians would not have employed nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to repel the Chinese in this scenario?

Maybe Mr. Clancy is not as knowledgeable about the Russians as his earlier work would lead one to believe.

The premise that Americans would be invited to help defend the "Motherland" is just the final nail in the coffin of the Tom Clancy legacy of good writing.

Save your money, or if you insist on reading this, buy the paperback version.

I finished "The Bear and the Dragon" yesterday after a read that took about three days. Overall, I found the book to be enjoyable, but also noticed a not small number of frustrations and irritations.

First, I was disappointed by the way the author sort of hastily tied up the subplot involving Ming. At the point in the novel where the Siberian War started she and the American spy in Beijing just sort of disappeared from the story.

Second, I was disappointed by the failure to follow through on the Mike Reilly part of the story. After the renegade KGB agent confessed to his work for the Chinese, it seemed like Clancy just let FBI agent Reilly and his colleague, the Russian police officer, fade out from the tale. I think that was a mistake, especially since the last appearance of Reilly was when he told the FBI director about the Chinese plot to kill the Russian president.

Third, I got pissed off by the overt anti-Clinton comments in the book. They are totally illogical in the Ryan-verse, of which this book is part, because Clinton was never President in this fictional Ryan-verse and there is no indication in any prior novel that any of Clancy's fictionalized American leaders exhibited behavior like Clinton did in the real world. In any event, this is fiction, not a political speech. We don't need to have Clancy's Republican point of view thrown at us so obviously.

And the same goes for his several criticisms of environmentalism and those who advocate for it. None of those nasty comments, which he had come out as "thoughts" of several characters, especially Admiral Mancuso, had anything at all to do with the plot and they didn't even do much to bring out the character's personality. Again, I thought these were just random, unnecessary and irritating windows into Clancy's personal politics.

I didn't like the way the climactic scene involving the missile strike on DC was handled, either. There had never been any hint before that part of the novel that the Navy's hotshot civilian programmer was having any trouble fixing the missile software to allow interception of an ICBM. All of a sudden Clancy drops this thing about how he programmed the interceptor missiles to hit the heat coming out of the ICBM engines. That was weird and it seemed to me Clancy just forgot to set the table for that development.

I also didn't see the point of the whole Ryan being dropped off on the cruiser thing. It didn't add anything to our well-developed understanding of the character and I couldn't figure out what Ryan, who normally shows such great judgment in the novels, was hoping to achieve with that move. Clancy even concedes that when he has Ryan say pretty much the same thing.

Finally, I thought Clancy's economics were a bit off mark. Granted, before the financial disaster our government created for itself since the novel was published the U.S. had a big budget surplus and a big trade deficit with China, so the author's imagination of a China that was bringing in huge export revenues and spending them on weapons and military equipment wasn't a bad one. However, he never really got around to explaining how the Chinese military could have spent so much money but be so incompetent and so bereft of modern weapons technology or modern combat tactics. This part of the novel was muddled, at best.

All in all, the novel kept my attention well. I am not sick of Jack Ryan as President. I hope, in fact, that Clancy writes another novel that focuses on what happened to Ryan after the events in "The Bear and the Dragon." While he's at it, maybe he can tie up the loose ends involving Reilly, Ming and the American agent, and the Russian general who became a hero in this novel (Bondarenko). And in what story was Robby Jackson supposedly killed off, anyway?

Big fan of Clancy's books, but I felt this was an overly-long and rushed effort. There were numerous spelling mistakes, factual errors (he switched what planes were doing what in a crucial sequence as if he forgot what he had already set-up) and perhaps the weirdest thing was that Clancy would repeat character's observations, opinions and thoughts repeatedly - as if he had run out of original things for them to say. If I had to read Robby Jackson say something about having "a Tomcat strapped to my back" one more time I was going to scream. The book takes a long time to get going and then wraps up a little too quickly - as if the publisher cut Clancy off and told him to get the book into stores. Don't get me wrong - Clancy is a fine at what he does, but clearly the attention to detail and imaginative work of his previous efforts are no longer applicable in his recent work. I was disappointed enough that I went back and read "Hunt for Red October" again. Hopefully he resists the urge to get more books/product onto shelves and takes his time to come up with more original material and more in-depth characters. This book was just irresponsible laziness on his part.

A step backwards from the previuos two efforts in the Jack Ryan/John Clark saga.

Much too long with a less then worthy finish. The story is somewhat compelling but the author does not mcuh excitment for the reader.

The Bear and the Dragon IS a long book. Although I like the "techno" details, it does tend to bog down the story.

I used to think that flying a plane into a building was fantasy...in Clancy's world maybe...not anymore. Economics bringing down a giant...in Clancy's world...not so unreal now, is it? China is facing a huge problem. The chemical additives in toothpaste and lead in our children's toys are making it through the Chinese factory quality controls. Remember the term, "real money impacts." Is it going to push us into a nuclear war with China? Probably not, but Clancy's novels have a way of meeting reality on several layers.

So, don't be so critical and enjoy the novel for what it is: a story told from the author's viewpoint, which no one has to agree with. It takes awhile to figure out how everything connects, but it leads towards an exciting conclusion. The ending was very satisfying.

I had high hopes when I bought this novel. The concept immediately enthralled me; the idea that the death of Boris Yeltsin creates a power vacuum, which resurrects the old Cold War hostilities between the west and the east. It is such a compelling concept that I couldn't help but buying it.

The first few chapters did not disappoint, as the plot moved quickly and set up much suspense. After the beginning, however, this disintegrated and the novel degraded into a sleep stimulator. By half way through this garbage it became a tedious snooze fest only useful for inducing a catatonic like sleep or as an ineffectual paperweight!

This novel was such a disappointment, mainly because it had so much potential. Shame on you Tom Clancy for getting my hopes up and then crushing them!

The best part about it is that it is short. Shame on Tom Clancy for allowing his name to be put on this worthless novel.

This book was a good book to read in an afternoon, but it needed some more length. It was great but it was to short. It had awesome details and action. It is very interesting about what might happen if the president of Russia did die. I recommend this book to anyone who has an afternoon to not do anything.

I'm a great admirer of Clancy's work but this is one of the rare occassions that he has not lived upto my expectations. It is also my first book in the "Power-Plays" series. I liked the way he prepared the plot upto the explosion but the story seem to lack "punch" after that. Still it is not that bad.

//From an unacknowleged letter to the publisher about the paperback edition// Page Erratum Comment 18 Bashkir...Far Eastern I think you mean "Siberian"; the Bashkirs are not in the Far East. If "Bashkir" is not an ethnic Bashkir, why does he have this name? (There is a famous pianist with the name Bashkirov) 30 Romual Perhaps you mean the Polish first name Romual'd (the apostrophe indicating the Russian soft sign, that being how the name is spelled in Russian) 43 Bishir yetso Neither I nor another experienced Russian linguist have any idea what this means. 62 vor v. zakone The period is not necessary (it's not a middle name!); rather than "godfather", such a person is more like the Mafia "made man" or, simply, "professional (as opposed to petty) thief", who subscribes to a code. See "Soviet Prison Camp Speech", by Meyer Galler, based largely on Solzhenitsyn's early works, for an excellent reference on this subject 110 Republican convention ?the previous summer"; in 1998? 181 Gorbachev He wasn't president in 1992 235 MIDI MIDI is a digital protocol governing the transmission of musical data between sound modules/synthesizers and computers or other sound modules/ synthesizers 261 Zgranitsa etc. Za granitsa (SIC) is a prepositional expression; no native Russian speaker would use it as the subject of a sentence like an English speaker might. 337 Mercedes Wold a rabid Russian nationalist/ Communist be seen in one of these? Bad image. . 343 Komerade ??? You mean "tovarishch"? "Komerad" is what German soldiers traditionally say when about to surrender 364 IL-76 This is a cargo plane, not a passenger plane. Although it is used to carry paratroopers, they don't sit in "passenger seats" any more than US airborne units do.

Internet police save the day.


Or something along those lines. While the whole premise of Clancy's Net Force Agency is rather silly, the people in it, both geeks and grunts come off as interesting enough to make this book readable, even more so probably if you are one of those people that likes silly computing and tactical reloads.

Not a writer with a deep grasp of the non-military technology by any stretch but this is fun enough.

As a computer and security professional I was hoping that this would be a Clancy-esque IT Thriller. The research and veracity I've come to expect from a Clancy novel was totally missing. Some of the forensic methods were completely wrong and the use of VR for following a hacker's trail was just stupid. I couldn't wait for this book to end and was tempted again and again to just quit wasting my time and burn the book so no one else would get hooked into reading it because of the Clancy Stamp.

Hmmmm...not quite what I expected. While the plot line provided some excitement and a surprise or two, this just wasn't as satisfying as some of the other series created by Clancy. The near future setting and the use of virtual reality both felt somewhat contrived. I'm not sure how the use of virtual reality scenarios improves the investigative abilities of the forensic computer analysts. I found the passages describing these scenarios to be distracting from the main plot line. Also, while I have no problem with character development, why do we need to have TWO love story subplots? It felt like overkill. Overall, this wasn't a terrible light read, but its far from the best thriller I've ever read.

This book is as great as the first one. The outline story is much more weaker but the personal stories of all characters (Alex, Toni, Tyrone) finish in this book (althrough they continue in next books:-)). If you (again) don't expect Clancy-class story, you've got (again) a very good book.

About 300 Pages of great story telling, but then an extra 200 page of complete nothing.

Most of the book was great and entertaining, but for a good part of it I read stuff that didnt seem to have any relevance to the plot whatsoever and could quite frankly be left out of the book without changing the story at all.
But I did enjoy the book overall, even though it should only have been a 300 page book.

Diction, different ways of speaking a language, and dialect, the author's word choice, all affect this novel extremely. Because of the fact that it has a dual setting in both England, and Quantico, Virginia, make the author's word choice one of the only ways that the reader can discern between the two settings.
In this passage, the diction used implies that we are in the U.S. "You're in the Neuro Ward at the base hospital. You had a CVA, a cerebrovascular accident. A stroke." Compare that to a different passage a little bit farther along. "Not much, my boy. I was ringing you up to see about that, ah . . .small matter we discussed recently over supper." What a difference! Just by reading the two quotes, one can immediately distinguish that the first was set in an Army Base, in America. The second set in a castle in England. The use of the words my boy, ringing, and supper insinuate that the reader is now in a different place, where people speak with different drawl.
The dialect used in this novel also helps us distinguish from the settings, but it also allows the reader to discern between the upper and lower classes. For example: "Oh, and Applewhite? Se if you can't drum up major Peel. If you should happen across him, tell him his lord wishes to dine with him." Compare that to this quote. "Come on ya blimey old codger! Give us your money afore we beat your bloody coat red!" This almost automatically allows the reader to tell that the first was the higher class, and the second, the lower.
Diction and dialect were two dreadfully important literary devices in this novel. Had the author not used these devices, the readers mind would be a jumble of places, and people.

Annotation:A super genius computer hacker tries to take over the world by takeing over major computers across the globe. The Net Force opperatives must track him down and stop him before it is to late.

Autor Bio:The book Net Force Night Moves was written by Tom Clancy. Tom Clancy is the number one on New York Times best selling authors. Tom has created many books that envolve a form of law enforcement that has to take down the terriost threat. He is a great author.

Evaluation:The book Net Force Night Moves was an all around good book. It took a little bit of time before the book got started before i got interested in it. Also I would get confused when the charcters would jump in and out of the virtual reality when trying to catch the hacker. The characters in the story were decent, they all worked well with the way the book was put together. I like Tom Clancy and the way his stories are very intersting.I would recommend this book to a person who likes a twisted computer hacker story.

I've read some of his other books that have been better. The story was a little disjointed. He had some characters like Mikhaly Ruzhyo, and a few others that had great potential, but he got too many things going at the same time and too little time for each of them to develop properly. I did like the way he portrayed Lord Coswell, the English billionaire. He figured he was a law unto himself and seems to have gotten away with murder (kinda like what's happening here in the United States). I enjoyed the book but it wasn't his best.

Not up to Clancy standards. The main premise is compelling- What might happen if a technological advancement were developed which could quickly break large prime number encryption, upon which the security of the world depends? A real theoretical possibility... This premise kept me reading right to the anti-climactic end. Some of the characters are interesting, like the Russian fellow who had a great subplot going, but even his ending is a letdown. The 2 main love stories are tiresome, detract from the main plot, and take up way too much ink. The virtual reality subplot is a leap of faith.
Not worth reading.
Currently reading Without Remorse, which is much better so far.

This is the very first Clancy novel I've tried and I wasn't much impressed. Basically a Sidney Sheldon melodrama with some science fiction tacked on. Also there were some unnecessary subplots that were weak and irrelevant (the colonel's son, the agent's love triangle, the female monk...). These took the edge away from what I thought was going to be a to-the-point, intense SciFi-thriller. Not a complete waste of time, but not time well spent.

overall i thought the book was excelent. the book kept me on my toes thinking about what was going to happen. the book was action packed with not only the whole gun slinging scene but also in the scence of how Tom portrayed the world years from now. I love how he made everything electonic. and how everything was made into a thechnologicaly advanced system.
the plot kept moving making the book a page turner. the only thing i disliked about the book, but made it flow however, was how it would jump between charators. beyond that i loved it.

The language used in the book is full of slangs.
But I do not think that the book is so bad as the reviewers say.
May be a good read for teenagers but not recommended for adults.

Up to this point, I have loved all the Clancy books I have read. This one was simply horrible. Please note that the author of this book is Steve Perry, not Tom Clancy, and it is not up to par with the works Clancy is known for.

The story line is very simplistic and they characters are very one dimensional. About 50 pages from the end you could predict the ending with a good degree of accuracy.

If you haven't read any of Clancy's books (the ones HE wrote), then pick one of those up. This one isn't worth the time or the money. Too bad 0 stars isn't an option.

I wrote my review about 40 pages from the end of the book. I must now revise it and remove all points. This has got to be about the worst book I have ever read!!!

I picked this book up because it was sitting there, I was out of reading material, and it had Tom Clancy's name on it. I was skeptical when Clancy hadn't written the book, but I thought that if he put his name on it, he believed in it.

There is no story here. Nothing happened. Nothing! ... A few disconnected scenes of people practicing martial arts, some guy drinking beer in virtual reality bars looking for clues (ridiculously stupid angle), and a conclusion that must have been written in one afternoon because the author was bored. The problem is, as is customary, I read to the end of the book to find that out.

... There were some parts that held some promise, but there is no coherency, and the conclusion is so bad that I wanted to destroy the book and any credibility it has. ...

I had thought, in the beginning, that CyberNation would be pretty good because Tom Clancy wrote a ton of really good books and many great video games are created based on his stories. However, as I read along, there was hardly anything to enjoy. Obviously, I had not read any of the other reviews, so I had no idea what trap I was falling into. The storyline of this book is devoid meaning and completely boring, the complete opposite of what Tom Clancy would normally write.
The "storyline" about Gridley, Howard, Michaels, Santos, Chance, and Keller is completely disjointed. One of the few reasons why this story is connected is that they are fighting against each other in the internet world, and using the VR, or "Virtual Reality", to track things down or to mess things up. In fact, the whole story is covered up with sex, crime, and violence that there is hardly any connection shown. Of course, if I had not been able to follow the storyline, I would not be able to write this, but it was still quite confusing.
So I ask, again, why did Steve Perry write this? He has no sense of what Mr Clancy writes, nor of his style, elegance, and flair. One cannot imitate a type of writing without being the type of person, obviously, so why did Mr Perry try to do so? Mr Clancy truly should write more of his own books, even if he thinks he is too important and too proud to do the writing. Mr Clancy and Mr Perry must have decided to play a prank on loyal fans of Mr Clancy (not that I am one) because this has disappointed many enthusiastic readers. Of course, these questions I am not really able to answer, but I would not be surprised if Mr Clancy's name was written in huge, bold letters on the book for the profit.