Rating: 
Summary: Very Good but not his best.
Review: I thought this was a really good book. I finished it within 5 days I was so engrossed in it. It is a little boring at parts but thats a norm in Clancy books because of all the detail and length in his books. The climax at the end was great and inpredictable. Debt of Honor or Without Remorse are better but Clany is getting old and running out of ideas. I would put this book around #6 or so out of the 10 or so Clany novels. Better: Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, Without Remorse, Sum of all Fears, Clear and Present Danger. Worse: Cardinal of the Cremlin, Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Red Storm Rising.
Rating: 
Summary: Not his best. Not his worst.
Review: Slow start, but great battle scenes. Jack Ryan has become a bit tiresome and the Hollywood ending is sort of silly.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of what he is good at...a little of what he is bad at!
Review: As a hard core Tom Clancy fan I found loads of the stuff that attracted me to Clancy in the first place...technically accurate mititary and governmental intrigue. In testing his skills at adding a little sex to his novels failed. Even I can come up with better name for it than a "sausage."The smartest thing Tom did, especially with 1,000 pages, was to keep the sexual encounters brief. He doesn't need the sex to be good, that what puts him above writers who have to rely on it to sell their books. Speaking as an avid reader of 1 to 2 books a week, I was not in the least bit turned off by the length. He had my attention all the way through and I'm all for longer books from Clancy and others. Well worth the read!
Rating: 
Summary: THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
Review: I FOUND THIS BOOK TO BE VERY CLOSE TO REALITY. IT TAKES A LITTLE TIME TO GET TO KNOW ALL THE DIFFERENT CHARACTERS IN THE NOVEL, BUT THE TIME IS WELL SPENT. CLANCY BRINGS TO LIGHT A LOT OF ISSUES THE WORLD SHOULD BE CONCERNED WITH ABOUT TWO ECONOMICALLY STRUGLING NATIONS AND THEIR DEALINGS WITH THE WESTERN NATIONS OF THE WORLD.
Rating:
Summary: Gratuitous use of the F word
Review: AS others have said, the book could have been shorter. It seems that the luster of Clancy's previous books has been replaced with the need to throw in a handful of profanity and an occasional limited sex scene. If this keeps up, the dialogue will become something akin to that of the Rogue Warrior series by Dick Marcinko!
Rating:
Summary: Most prolific use of the "F-word" since Blair Witch Project
Review: I've read every Clancy novel - usually getting it for Christmas and reading it before New Years. This one I started at Christmas and put down a while and didn't finish until April. Does that say something about how it held my attention or just turned me off? Maybe. China has depleted all of its cash reserves and their bargaining with the US to gain favored nation status is not going well when a televised tragic incident in Beijing involving the Chinese police, the Vatican ambassador and an American-educated Chinese Baptist pastor brings the negotiations to a sudden end. Meanwhile, Russia discovers a rich deposit of oil and gold in Siberia, not far from the Chinese border. What are the Chinese to do? It is typical Clancy. It is a well-researched technopolitical thriller with cliche character development, but many interweaving subplots. Throughout the series, we have watched, rather incredulously, the meteoric rise of Jack Ryan from history professor to the reluctant President of the United States. Now we watch great hordes saved by incredible luck. Don't get me wrong - I like the stories. As far as Clancy books go, I'll rate this one somewhere in the middle. The thing that completely turned me off, though, was the sex and language that contributed nothing to the story. It seems that Clancy sprinkled the book with profanity just for the sake of inserting profanity, and did similarly with the awkwardly-written sex scenes. Clancy should stick to writing about political exchange and weapons systems. So the story was good, but the sex and language took away from my being able to enjoy this book, so this will probably be the last Clancy book that I read.
Rating: 
Summary: Ponderous!
Review: Clancy's right wing-nut politics are over exposed in this one. Of the 1,000+ pages, there are 500 pages of a good (not great) story, 300 pages of unnecessary detail (the minutia is overwhelming), and 200 pages of Clancy's overactive ego. This is not near a good as the early Clancy books (Red October or Red Storm). The ending was predictable, anti-climactic and incomplete. Clancy again demonstrates how misogynistic and racist he is. His revisionism of history is particularly annoying. He doesn't seem to remember his "heroes'" failings: Nixon (Watergate and Viet Nam, "we could've won"); Reagan (Iran/Contra, Ollie North ignoring the law); and Bush (Gulf War with the not-so-smart or effective weapons against an incompetent foe.) I recommend The Partner, by Grisham.
Rating:
Summary: Resharpen the knife
Review: Customary Clancy and that is the conundrum. Like every other book in the Ryan collection, THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON is an account of what, presumingly, could happen. (In this instance, the threat Chinese adventurism into a de-clawed Russia brings to international security and stability.) As any long time reader should expect, there are multiple at-surface-value unrelated events eventually commencing to merge somewhere near the midpoint of this 1028 page volume. There is a liberal mix of espionage and covert operations, with the lengthy, but meticulous, descriptions of technological battlement available in the U.S. arsenal. Anyone looking for a wide range of complex multi-dimensional characters should look elsewhere. Such character development has never really been a focus of this series and there is little deviation here. For me, the problem has become one of familarity and freshness. Clancy has always written in a present time context with an eye toward prominent political and economic issues. Real time, real life plausibility enhanced my ability to accept his premises. BATD is not centered on what I perceive to be a legitimate threat to U.S. or international security. That said, the conclusion although not unexpected, left me feeling unfulfilled. My marginal dissatisfaction is neither based entirely on plot unbelievability, nor necessarily did I find content and style disconcerting. By and large, BATD does not detour from what I anticipated, and THAT has become the problem. As the leader of the free world, the protagonist, Jack Ryan cannot reasonably be expected to remain as singularly focused as he was portrayed in each book - where he appeared as the central character - prior to EXECUTIVE ORDERS. As president, his beliefs are part of the story. The philosophical positions of his opposition (whether Clancy supports or disagrees, whether they are politically correct) are incumbent to crafting an intriguing story line. It's simply not precisely the same focus as the initial books in this series, like RED OCTOBER or THE CARDINAL. On one level, the series could be re-energized by identification of threats of greater feasibility and probability, or it just might be time to pass the lead character baton to Ding Chavez and get back to the espionage and attention to technological detail that originally made me seek out each of the newest releases as soon as they were available.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacking originality
Review: It's been awhile since I've paid for a Clancy book, mostly I just wait till I can check them out at the library for free. Which was a wise decision in the case of his latest effort. Not that it was bad per se, however, while it delivered the basics in terms of readability and entertainment value, one really should expect a lot more from one of America's best selling authors. In short, Clancy is just coasting on the reputation he built up with his initial novels, knowing full well that just about anything with his name on the cover will hit the best seller lists, so why try any harder than he has to? This is a shame, and the result is a series of books which, much like the "Lethal Weapon" or "Die Hard" movies, succeeds mainly by sticking to a predictable formula. It basically goes like this: Bad guys will cook up a scheme to wreak havoc on the civilized world, this scheme will eventually be detected by the good guys (led by Jack Ryan) who, after suffering some initial setbacks, will win the day with a combination of high tech wizardry and good old John Wayne style guts. Which is Ok as far as it goes, however Clancy, having made more money than God with his novels, film royalties, video games, etc., is surely in a position to take some risks, and expand his craft as a writer. Unfortunately, he seems content to follow the easy route, and stick with a tried and true, if uncreative, formula. Anyway, the gist of this book is this. A handful of warlords in mainland China decide they want to seize some very valuable oilfields and gold mines in Far Eastern Siberia. They plot an invasion, and in due time, set in it motion. Of course, they are, in the end, utterly defeated (Oh, I know that's considered a "spoiler", but let's be honest, does anyone have the least doubt that this is the final outcome?) and Jack Ryan, John Clark, Ed & Mary Pat Foley, and a host of lesser characters triumph in the end. There are, of course, the trademark battle scenes in which the Good Guys utilize the latest technology to win the day, just as surely as Bond can be expected to vanquish SPECTRE thanks in large part to Q's ingenious gadgets. Like I said, pure formula, and Clancy, I suppose, can at least be credited for making the formula work in producing yet another best seller. Too bad he didn't try harder. He does attempt to grapple with some genuinely tough foreign policy issues, and he also has the guts to put China's population control policy in an appropriately negative light. Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. No question that the current Chinese leadership are villains with the blood of Tianamnen Square fresh on their hands, however, I very much doubt they are are as stupid and simple minded as Clancy makes them out to be. His ending (another spoiler) in which Chinese students peacefully seize power from the Politburo seems entirely contrived. The whole thing is just entirely too simplistic, one gets the impression that Clancy made little effort to actually learn about how the Chinese government, authoritarian though it may be, actually functions. Its leaders may indeed be evil, but I very much doubt they are the buffoons Clancy makes them out to be. The future of relations between China and the USA is still very much up in the air. Hopefully, in due time, they will choose to join the rest of the civilized world in terms of supporting individual liberty and human rights, but as far as this novel goes, instead of taking a serious look at how this process might evolve, settles for giving us yet another cliched "Techno-thriller".
Rating:
Summary: a little long, but worth the effort...
Review: This book confirms Clancy's status as one of the best writers of political-techno fiction around. Yes, it was long, very long, but I thought that the highly-involving story and interesting characters made up for the somewhat slow pace of the novel (that has been complained about below ad nauseum). I disliked the writer's strong moral bias towards America and against the Chinese, and the way that everything runs perfectly for the Americans ("the underdogs") while the Chinese stumble at every opportunity. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the relationships between the characters as well as the unusual scenario that is presented by Clancy as having the potential to cause a nuclear war.
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