The Bear and the Dragon

Rating:
Summary: I think Tom is bored, and would quit except it pays so well
Review: I am a Clancy fan and have read all of his single author work.

The book dragged. It took a long time to get going and then it didn't last long. Mr. Clancy is famous for the techno thriller genre. In this one he forgot the thriller and the techno.

His hero Jack Ryan, shows up to be a chain smoking, alcoholic, sexist, preacher for a watered down Roman Catholism. He is willing to comitt suicide, rather than be thought a coward. The villians are all shallow dirty old men. Two of his best characters are both gunned down early in the plot.

There a long poorly done uneeded seduction scene. There is an account of diplomacy which if accurate would seem to indicate that all diplomats die of boredom.

The story is pedicatable and not very interesting.

Please Tom, we know you can do better.

Rating:
Summary: The Bear and the Dragon
Review: I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Clancy years ago, right after The Hunt for Red October caught the country by storm. I liked his book and his writing. I have read almost all his books, the paperback techno thrillers are trash, and it only took 3 of them to convince me he was getting paid for his name and not his talent. His latest book has some good ideas but he gets lost delivering the material with bizarre subplots that had no meaning on the story. It is like he is getting paid by the pound for his work. This book could have been done in 600 pages and it would have been a page turner, instead it was 1000+ pages of yawner in some spots. This book was worse than Rainbow Six which was pure manure, because it could have been a good book. Rainbow Six started with the impossible and continued to get more unbelievable on every page. At least this book has some interesting ideas, but his delivery of the material to the public missed by a long shot.

Rating:
Summary: This book is total garbage
Review: Clancy has totally hit the wall. 90% of this mammoth waste of paper concerns Ryan's (Clancy's) musings concerning his ultra right wing political views. The foul language, use of code names, continual racist comments is just trash. It is particularly interesting that Clancy previously at least featured women having an important role in the military. None of the so called expert reviewers seem to have noticed their total absence this time. Ryan's wife (keeping her barefoot and pregnant) is reduced to a "jack what is going on" moron. Andrea, previously a hero, is sent home at the time of crisis because she is pregnant. Ming is a used sex object. For the 3rd book in a row a very small American military intrusion (this time with the help of 3 Russian divisions) has totally destroyed a vastly superior foe, and again, none of the good guys get hurt. Gee, isnt war fun. And yet again the FBI is a great American institution without flaws. Get real, Tom. Comments welcome at [e-mail].

Rating:
Summary: The Bore and the Drag on
Review: I give. After taking 1028 pages to tell a 350 page story, I wave the white flag of surrender. Clancy clearly doesn't trust his reader base to remember characters from one book to the next. Hence, ever expanding tomes of work. We all know who Ryan is and how he got there. We Jackson, the Foleys, Sandbox and the rest. Why retell all their stories. There was a great story buried in this novel. They say the devil is in the detail and Clancy shows us hell. The only reason I finished the book was to write this review. I'd give it a zero but not an option. Isn't he supposed to have an editor to save him from himself?

Rating:
Summary: Contractual obligations
Review: The above can be the ONLY reason TC wrote this. He obviously didn't enjoy it, and didn't care if the reader did or not. Aside from the Phyllis Schafly anti-abortion screeds, the "media are a pain" asides, and the execrable dialogue, its just not a good story. BORING. Wait for the neighbors garage sale, and pick this up on the bargain table if you absolutely must read it.

Rating:
Summary: Gadget Man Meets '70's Gabmeisters!
Review: Once again, Jack Ryan and his band of shooters and spooks save the day. Well-researched? Yes - TC's made this his benchmark since they came out with the Freedom of Information Act. Well-crafted? Well, sorta. He's come a long way since "Red October," and anyone familiar with his corpus notices this in the text...to say nothing of the countless references to his earlier work.

When interviewed on NBC's "The Today Show" in mid-August, Clancy was lambasted by Matt Lauer for his politically UN-correct turns of phrase (he mentions "tree-huggers" half a dozen times in the text), and a James Bond-like tendency to stereotype. The motivation for Lauer's question becomes obvious after the first 300 pages. Clancy's reply was straightforward: he doesn't write to the masses, just to those who know what to expect of the genre. For the rest of you, go back to Berkeley or Evergreen or Vermont or whatever den of warm-and-fuzzy sensitivity you came from - this is statecraft, and it ain't pretty.

While digesting this new installment in the Jack Ryan Universe - in a lot of ways similar to how a python digests a gerbil - I couldn't help but notice some striking similarities to some gadget-driven geopolitical thrillers of days gone by. But don't take my word for it. Fetch a copy of anything Paul J. Eerdman wrote in the '70's ("The Silver Bears", "The Billion Dollar Sure Thing", "The Crash of '79"), or anything from the hand of cop-author Joseph Waumbaugh ("The Delta Star," et. al.). Given the sheer girth of "Bear and the Dragon," a comparison is begged to an equally verbose and detailed writer, none other than James A. Michener ("Space," "Chesapeake," "Texas," and on and on.). But at least Michener's people checked for typos.

Overall, though, a good read. Verbose, predictable, techno-glossed, but a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Would have been better if it was 500 pages
Review: This book was decent (not his best by a long shot), but it may not be worth the time investment required to read 1000+ pages. It should have and could have been much shorter....

Rating:
Summary: something's wrong
Review: I have gobbled every TC novel down since Red October. This novel was the same--I couldn't stop reading it. However, something was amiss. Was this just a rough draft? There were numerous editing errors of use and of fact. The name China inserted where clearly the context meant Japan. The Beltway around Washington is 495 not 695--695 is Baltimore... This is something about which I am very disappointed and surprised because I have come to expect so much more. Lastly on this front, I thought the use of the F word was a little on the heavy side for no apparent reason. In previous novels, for the most part, the use was reserved for spoken dialogue in situations where it made sense. In this novel it was everywhere. Just seems like that was not very TC like.

Besides all of the editing errors, what happened to some of these characters? When did Ryan become somewhat of an indecisive whiner? What happened to the person who penned the Ryan Doctrine? Plus, it didn't seem as if Ryan developed at all beyond his whining. I thought he developed the "you won't that right in front of me" attitude in London with the terrorists long before Red October. It was further refined in Exec Orders with the Ryan Doctrine. Now, he seems to have that same thought presented to us as new at Auschiwtz? Did Mary Pat ever say "honey bunny" in Cardinal? Here it becomes extremely annoying while at the same time making Ed Foley seem little more than an empty suit and a puppet.

Lastly, and possibly worst of all, after 900 hundred pages of setup and 95 pages of bloodlust, TC wraps the whole thing up in a couple of paragraphs leaving huge holes. This was most unlike his other works and it left me to feel as if I had been dropped off of a cliff.

Just my $0.02...

Rating:
Summary: unoriginal, shallow, and offensive
Review: Tom Clancy is a relic of the past who is desperately trying to find a well-defined enemy. This novel is simply a rehash of his previous plots, follow a well-worn and time-tested recipe: pick enemy, pick some new top-secret weapons, diplomatic resolution fails, fight and kill enemy, America victorious. In Executive Orders, it was the UIR and IVIS. In Debt of Honor, it was Japan and the F-22 and Comanche weapons. In The Bear and the Dragon, it's China and Dark Star and Smart Pig. It's uninspired, limp, and boring.

It's also offensive. Tom Clancy abandons all restraint in his racist portrayal of China, building on the "China = bad" animosity he started in Debt of Honor, assisted by a generous helping of racial epithets by the cast of heroes up to and including Jack Ryan (note that Ryan has never used a racial epithet against an Israeli, Arab, or Russian, but he certainly does in this novel). In particular, he portrays the Chinese as an ethnocentric, unfaithful, and lying people capable of "incomprehensible barbarism." He constantly compares the Chinese government and its policies to Hitler. He does not even bother with distinguishing between government policy and the Chinese people. In Clancy's lexicon, Chinese people are "slant-eyed bastards" whose "dicks aren't big enough to get in a pissing contest with us." Racism, even in fiction, is unacceptable.

Don't read it.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Clancy Ever
Review: I don't read Tom Clancy books and expect writing like John Le Carre, but this one is a new low in Hardy Boy like prose. It also features a lot more of the worst written character in American fiction, his pal Robbie. Every scene this guy is in makes me cringe with embarssment that Clancy is actually trying to pawn him off as a real human. Boy's Life magazine has more real sounding dialog. If I had to read once more about "fighter jocks strapping an F-14 on their backs" (which we had to hear about, verbatim, at least five times) I was going to puke. Oh, and can you imagine a Tom Clancy love scene? Don't. I have enjoyed Tom Clancy books immensely over the years, and might again, but the next one will wait till it's out in paperback, if there is a next one. Maybe he just cranked this one out to pay for his divorce.