Rating: 
Summary: Good effort
Review: With so many sub-plots it takes a little while get rolling but...Clancy has done it again. I have always enjoyed Clancy's tales and this one is no exception.Don't over analyze this effort...just sit back and enjoy the tale, I did. This could be the end of Jack Ryan though...after being President and orchestrating a global war where does one go. Maybe Clinton can answer that one.
Rating: 
Summary: Yuck.
Review: I have read all of Mr. Clancy's previous works. I was disappointed with this one. Previous reviewers have expressed my views up very well: this book is repetitive, polemical, self-indulgent and *way* too long. Disabling the cut-and-paste ability of Mr. Clancy's word processor would have improved this novel greatly. Is Mr. Clancy really writing these novels anymore, or has he sold the franchise? It is difficult to believe that this is the same author who wrote 'Hunt for Red October' and 'Red Storm Rising'. The poor editing of late makes me wonder if the credit for these earlier should really go to Mr. Clancy's editors of the time. I deeply regret buying this book. I won't buy his next.
Rating:
Summary: Nowhere near his earlier creations. . .
Review: Ok, I'll admit, I snuck a peak at the reviews before I started the book, just a small one, and they are right on point. First, and I'll address this directly to Tom Clancy, YOU ARE NOT PRESIDENT, and YOU ARE NOT JACK RYAN. I am so tired of his reactionary politics being inserted into every phrase. He denigrates, in no particular order : Jews, Jewish Americans, Asians, Asian Americans, Gays, Women, Muslims, and the poor. Women are there to be manipulated, used, and nodded to while they clean. Jews are smart lawyers looking to make money at the expense of working people. Asians are just too stupid to make any correct decision, even though they've had civilization far longer than we. Muslims are heretics. Christianity is all powerful, and abortion is terrible. Aside from his political views, can we get back to regular people? Robby Jackson was a great character, relegated now to a title, with perfunctory lines. Same with Jack Ryan. Basically, Tom Clancy now believes that he is Jack Ryan, and should be President, and XO and TBATD are his vision for the US, militaristic, xenophobic, exclusionary, and isolationist. Oh wait, am I whining and bitching too much? Maybe I'm becoming Jack Ryan too. Ok, on another note, completely aside from my view of his unnecessary insertion of political messages, WHERE WAS THE PROOFING!?!?! My dad has written a couple books, and he reads them 5-6 times between each draft, and he produces at least 5 drafts. That's before it goes to final review, which is before the publisher ever sees it. This book looked like he wrote it in Word at home, spell checked it, and emailed it to the publisher. Unfortunately, we've all been duped. Between this monstrosity and the Op Center BS, I'm getting very jaded.
Rating:
Summary: First Clancy Book I Didn't Like
Review: This was the first Tom Clancy book I've read that I really didn't like. The real action in the story doesn't begin until you're a full *750* pages in. 750 pages before anything interesting happens. Amazing. And I thought Stephen King was poorly edited! Even worse, then after you get to the 250 pages of interesting action, the book abruptly and stupidly just ends. After 750 pages of setup, it would've been nice to have seen some closure on all of the many storylines Clancy had going. And I was waiting the whole book for Jack Ryan to meet some of these arrogant Chinese ministers face to face, but it never happened. Very disappointing. Obviously, Clancy needs an editor. Too many characters, too many needless subplots, too much filler. An incomplete and unsatisfying ending. And for the first time, I really, really got tired of Clancy's style of dialogue where every character has to mention the other character's name in just about every sentence. Real people just don't talk like that.
Rating:
Summary: Another Good Story
Review: It seems that many of the reviewers giving The Bear and the Dragon a poor rating are doing so because of a political agenda of their own. Too much swearing or sex? Neither of these things was significant in the book. Tom Clancy is described as too white and Catholic for some other reviewers. If you like Tom Clancy books or techno thrillers in general you'll like this book. It did seem to take him a little too long to get the plot running, but I suspect this is because it is difficult to set the action so that it is easy to believe. Clancy does an amazing job of writting spy thrillers that can be believed in the post cold war world. This scenario as many of his previous ones was quite easy to believe in the light of the current world situation.
Rating: 
Summary: No need to rush out for this one
Review: Mr. Clancy is lucky he wrote such good books at the beginning of his career, because he's trained us to go out and buy the latest one as soon as possible. This latest effort (?), with its lack of editing, decline of favorite characters (Jack Ryan as "The Whiner"), and less than subtle soapboxing, is the book that breaks me of this habit.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much
Review: Too much unnecessary profanity Too much whineing by Pres Ryan. Too much Clancy agenda about abortion. Some factual errors. Lone Wolf Gonzales's last name was incorrectly spelled, It was actually Gonzaullas. Whine, whine. Gee I sound like Jack Ryan.
Rating:
Summary: Too Much
Review: Too much unnecessary profanity Too much whining by Pres Ryan. Too much Clancy agenda about abortion. Some factual errors. Lone Wolf Gonzales's last name was incorrectly spelled, It was actually Gonzaullas. Whine, whine. Gee I sound like Jack Ryan. Much too long.
Rating:
Summary: "If I was president, I would...." , aka Tom Clancy's latest
Review: OK, let's start by pointing out the obvious here: Jack Ryan = Tom Clancy The guy can't get any more obvious. I suppose I'm one of those damned liberals that Tom always rages about in his books, but I've managed to ignore his increasingly bombastic political diatribes in most of his books until now. I realize that the guy is conservative to the core, but it is only through this book that I have come to realize that we disagree on almost every political issue he has chosen to express his viewpoint on. Normally this would not make me avoid his books- if a guy can write, a guy can write, right? But TC has made his viewpoints so ingrained in his writing that I can't manage to read a page without thinking "Where the hell is this guy coming from?" He casually slanders Asians, Asian Americans, Gays and Lesbians, and even Women- all in about 100 pages of the book. Call me easily offended, but I resent the repeated use of the word "chink" in this novel and the increased profanity and sex content. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something to be said for using those types of passages sparingly. Clancy seems to have lost the knack for keeping a storyline interesting, and as a sideshow he has allowed his arch-conservative political beliefs to distort his characters so much as to make them unrecognizable to someone who has read all of his other novels. I will finish this book, but next time he puts one out I will not buy it, unless he manages to clean up his act and write a decent, honest and interesting ACTION-ADVENTURE novel, not a "What I would do if I were president" storybook full of ignorance and bigotry. In truth, this book would be wonderful if you took Jack Ryan out of it completely, (it would be about 3-400 pages shorter too!) but since that would be removing Tom's mouthpiece I doubt he'd ever do it. Just my 2 cents
Rating:
Summary: The Last Tom Clancy book I'll ever read...
Review: I was interested in seeing where Mr. Clancy would take Jack Ryan after the last installment of his adventures. While they were always highly improbable, they did have the whiff of realism and were highly entertaining. "The Bear and the Dragon" fails on multiple levels, the most damning of which is it's stultifying pace and the bigoted opinions of the author. It is essentially a vanity piece where Mr. Clancy allows his ego to recreate a world where everything is as it should be... according to his sophomoric intellect. All the cabinet officers have been to Jesuit colleges, except for "the Jew". All are adamantly antiabortion (he discourses at some length on this) and it is a testament to his laziness or lack of ability that all the characters keep using the same phrases and obscenities. The impression I got was that the novel generating software Mr. Clancy uses is not the latest upgrade. In comparison, while "The Hunt for Red October" was a taut lean thriller that was enjoyable and informative, "The Bear and the Dragon" was a bloated, lethargic and even offensive in its lack of regard for the readers intelligence and its author's indulgence of his own pathetic fantasies.
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