Rating: 
Summary: Typical Clancy novel
Review: Have read all of Clancy's novels, and agree with the usual comments so won't go into them. Enjoyed Rainbow Six despite the usual quirks. However, regarding Carol Brightling's cat....aren't calicos almost, if not always, female? Isn't a male calico a biological improbability? Maybe, since Brightling is a scientist, "Jiggs" is one of her experiments. Or maybe Clancy was just too busy researching other things to realize this!
Rating: 
Summary: This book reads like a comic, not a gritty Clancy thriller
Review: Before I begin, I would like to state that I am (or was) a Tom Clancy fan. I loved his early books (Red Storm Rising, Hunt for Red October) and I have a copy of all of his published non-fiction works (Marine, Airborne, Armoured Warfare, Airwing, and Submarine). I also happen to be an veteran Ranger NCO and have a pretty good understanding of the technical details Clancy writes about.This book comes across like a poorly-scripted made-for-TV movie (like the abysmal Ops Center). As a Ranger, its nice to have folks glorifying us as good guys, but does everything have to black-and-white? The good guys are incredibly good, and the bad guys incredibly evil (and stupid, i might add). In addition, the unbelievable plot stretches realism a little thin and does nothing for the book. If terrorists were really that dumb and make so many critical errors, we wouldn't need spec ops units to deal with them. We would just spank them and send them to bed without supper. Counter terrorism is a high-risk business and casualties are to be expected when engaging heavily armed and fanatical people, regardless of how well a unit is trained. For a unit to be so unbelievably lucky (as depicted in the book), all of the time sends the plot into comic-book territory.
Rating:
Summary: Dis-appointment, but readable
Review: I come away from Clancy's books expecting two things:(1) to be entertained, and (2) to learn something. In this case, neither of the expectations was fullfilled. The plot is too predicable and a bit campy. And unlike most of his previous books, I did not learn a thing about how a machine works, how a system operates, or the effect of one form of political thought on another. His characters are at best, weak. And of the very few "snake eaters" that I have met, his characters are completely unlike the real thing. This book was almost as useless as Patriot Games-hence it will probably be a smash hit in the mass media movie arena.
Rating: 
Summary: Trivial plot, disjointed, improbable beyond reason.
Review: I really wanted to like the book. At first it held some promise but lacking the necessary research and understanding of even the basics like; what a vegan is or what a vegan eats among hundreds of other improbable components made it impossible to reach any rational ending. The length was partially a result of poor writing, poor continuity and redundancy. Characters deteriorated in believable personality and events had obvious plausable alternatives that made the course taken by the plot naive. Terrible wasted effort.
Rating:
Summary: Not Tolstoy, but nearly as long, and way more fun....
Review: I really loved this book. I stopped reading many of Clancy's works, because he often beats around the bush for four hundred pages or so, then finally gets the action rolling. Rainbow Six is quite different. As the main plot (admittedly a slightly over-zealous characterization of environmentalists) slowly unfolds, Clancy does a nice job of entertaining you with the some of the preliminary outings of the elite anti-terrorism outfit for whom the book is named. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the movie is doubtlessly already in the works.....not the greatest novel ever writtem but certainly one of the more entertaining in my recent memory.
Rating:
Summary: Great as a book goes, not so good as a Clancy book goes
Review: This IS a TC book, but it just doesn't have everything that the previous ones did. I had just finished rereading Clear and Present Danger which is one of his best in my mind, and R6 just didn't have what CPD did. This book was simply thrown together, almost as if to go along with the release of the game. Definatly a great book, but a poor one as Clancy books go. Being subjected to some of his extreme views didn't help, either.
Rating:
Summary: A solid effort, but not Clancy's best
Review: Well, Mr. Clancy has published another offering to his legions of fans (myself included). I read the book in about 3 days. Basically, I liked it, but found parts of it to be repetitive. I must confess that I was disappointed in not seeing more of Jack Ryan. Clancy left him out in Without Remorse (an excellent novel that is one of my favorites), but there seems no real reason to do so given the plotline he chose. Certainly the President would be involved in the international terrorist problems discussed by the book. I must also say that i found the ending to be a bit unsettling. However, being a practical person i believe i might have done something similar. I have virtually no tolerance for those that commit violent or heinous crimes and offer some lame justification to the rest of humanity. I guess, if you play by the rules, you should be accorded common courtesies. If you choose to abandon civilization, then society's niceties need not be extended to you. Beware. I look forward to Mr. Clancy's next book.
Rating:
Summary: John Clark meets "Op Center", or "Sophomoric Power Politics"
Review: Tom Clancy has built a reputation for impeccable research and gripping plot lines. "Rainbow Six" fails in both regards. While I consider "Hunt for Red October" to be the archetypal "technothriller", "Rainbow Six" reads like one of his mass-produced "Op Center" books with a couple of familiar characters. Mr. Clancy has trouble differentiating between the strategic, operational and the tactical levels of warfare -- and although the basic plot lines of "Rainbow Six" are astute (growing threat of terrorism; danger of biowar; ascension of the multinational corporation as a mechanism of political power), he drops the ball by giving us shallow characters with only a thin veneer of credibility. I think Mr. Clancy does his reputation a grave injustice by pawning this dime store piece of pulp fiction in the guise of his far-better written Jack Ryan sagas.
Rating:
Summary: Clancey's politics kept slapping me in the face.
Review: I finished reading Rainbow 6 yesterday. Always up for Clancey, I really looked forward to this one. Unfortunately, it was only an OK read. Like so many others, I was quite disappointed. Clark, Chavez and their respective spouses were given all the dimension and depth of matched set of Ken and Barbie dolls. Perfect, cutesy, predictable. Make-believe dialog. The men of Rainbow were equally perfect and perfectly flat - like a box of toy soldiers. When they weren't splattering the brains of bad guys, these gents were like something out of Mr. Rogers neighborhood. The bad guys suffered from equally thin character development. The terrorists in Europe were like so many three stooges. The Environmentally inclined terrorists characters were like hallucinations of a right-wing zealot. It bothered me that Clancey is letting a lot more of his political views (agenda?) creep into the narrative. While I don't exactly line up with him politically, I could always look past that and get lost in the narrative. In this book clancey's politics kept slapping me in the face. It was embarrassing! The novel suffered from poor editing (or no editing), flat characters, repetitive and predictable dialog, predictable plot lines. What ever you do, do not buy this book. If you spend money on this book you will probably regret it. Then to feel better, you'll want to give it to someone you know. Only then you'll feel bad because it's such a bad read. Check it out of a library if you have to read it. There will be a lot of copies available.
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to par-- wait for the next Clancy book.
Review: Weak characters, poor plot, doom this book to mediocrity. You want some good thrillers that you might not have read, check out the following titles: DRAGON SIM-13, CUT OUT, SYNBAT, EYES OF THE HAMMER, ETERNITY BASE. I've read every one and loved them. They're about Special Forces operations written by someone who obviously knows what the hell he's talking about. I'm retired Special Forces so I know! Great reads.
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