Rainbow Six

Rating:
Summary: Rainbow Six is a chilling, thrilling action novel....
Review: Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's 10th novel and ninth in the Jack Ryan/John Clark series, once more focuses on the ex-CIA paramilitary field officer known in the Agency as Mr. Clark. This time, the focus once again turns to the challenges of fighting global terrorists and the menace from extremists determined not only to reshape society, but the entire planet's environment.

Clark is close to retiring as a paramilitary officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations when Agency executive directors Ed and Mary Pat Foley, with the tacit approval of the recently elected President John Patrick Ryan, ask him to run an elite team of antiterrorist Special Ops fighters from several NATO countries. Their mission: to act as an international 911 team in hostage and other terror-related situations deemed too high-risk for local law-enforcement agencies. Based in England, this so-called Rainbow Team will be deployed mainly in Europe, but with support from U.S. and other allied nations, can operate anywhere in the world. Clark, who was an enlisted member of a SEAL team in Vietnam, is given a rank equivalent to a full colonel and the call sign Rainbow Six. (In military parlance, the designator "six" after a unit's call sign is assigned to a commanding officer.)

Rainbow Six opens with a tense incident high above the Atlantic as a small group of Basque terrorists attempts to hijack the plane carrying Clark, his wife, his protege and new son-in-law Domingo "Ding" Chavez, and Alistair Stanley, his British second in command, to London. Using their wits and finely honed skills, the three Rainbow members overwhelm the hijackers and save the crew and their fellow passengers.

With this introduction to the job, Clark then turns his attention to training the various members of the several Rainbow teams, not knowing that the airliner incident was simply one of many terrorist incidents being bankrolled by a mysterious and wealthy individual with a darker, more terrifying agenda. With the assistance of a former KGB officer and inspired by one of the most horrible aspects of the Iranian plot against the U.S. (as chronicled in Executive Orders), a group of environmental extremists is plotting to reverse centuries of man-made damage to the Earth's biosphere by committing the most horrible act of mass murder in history.

Clancy's novel paints a troubling picture of what happens when a noble idea (such as promoting global conservation) is twisted and perverted by charismatic and cold-blooded individuals, and its action-oriented plot inspired an ongoing series of computer games.

Rating:
Summary: Rainbow Six: Great Book
Review: Rainbow Six is a great book; Tom Clancy is an awesome author

Rating:
Summary: Iincredible
Review: None of my friends actually thought that i read this book (cause im only 10) but after they saw it they were all amazed. Anyway lets get down to buisness.

This was just the best book ever made because: I loved the action, great characters, unthinkable plot, great detail, and its wicked graphical. This was the first Clancy book i read but i was not bored with it. If you have read any Tom Clancy book at all (besides this one) read Rainbow Six. You won't be able to put it down! If you dont feel like going through all the talking and everything (every tom clancy book) well this book has plenty of action. If you read the sample pages you'll see this part. Theres like a gun fight on a plane. Luckily John Clark was there. Theres no telling how AWSOME this book was. (If you noticed i capitalized AWSOME just to get people's attention.)

This book was amazing and you should atleast read it.

Rating:
Summary: A good, if not flawed yarn....
Review: Rainbow Six is pure rubish if you want geopolitical realism; however, the action has a more or less authentic feel to it. The action is intense and all together fast pace. Lots of detailed research about the weapons and tactics was present. However, the plot was somewhat ridiculious. I highly doubt that the enemy in the story could pull off something like that without being caught (esp. since its not even a country). Also, it seemed a bit glorified about the Team, which was composed of mainly, surprise, Americans. All in all, a decent story with lots of action and little plot.

Rating:
Summary: Good Rainbow....
Review: I loved Rainbow Six because it added the realism that I love about Tom Clancy, but I gave this novel 4 stars because he messed up on one little thing.
That thing being is that one of the charatchers Tom Clancy is referring to, is that he was born to a Chinese father and a Latino mother.
One...when you are referring to a woman who has Latin blood in her, you dont call her a Latino, she is a Latina. Second Latina's dont date Asian's or Germans, they only go out with black's and other Latino's.
But beyond that, this is a GOOD novel, the action is there, and this is one of his best novels, I just wish that Red Rabbit had the same action like Rainbow Six does.
I also liked the charatcher Domingo Chavez, and another thing when his son was born, he named him John Connor Chavez. One other thing; A Latino man does not name his son John Connor Chavez or any other name that is not referring to his Latin roots.
Latin men who have kids want their kids to have Latin names and for a Latino man to name his son John Connor Chavez is just out of the picture.

Rating:
Summary: This book is utter rubbish
Review: This book is bad, bad rubbish with extra bad for good measure. It represents little more than a vehicle to wax lyrical about how good and great American soldiers (and their little buddies in the UK) are.

Perhaps the worst aspect of it is the horrible boorish characters. Both the good guys and the bad guys (the latter actually being a term used by the former) are emotionless, one dimensional cartoon characters. The Rainbow team are all squeaky clean superheroes. Their wives are all straw-person brainless babymakers. All the other women are evil and conniving. Anyone with environmental concerns is a treehugger. Perhaps worst of all is the cultural and racial stereotypes applied to so many of the non-American characters. British men-even bartenders refer to people as "chaps". Obviously Clancy has only ever spoken with Torys like Jeffrey Archer or John Major so he wouldn't know that 80% of British men DO NOT say "chaps". Australian men DEFINITELY never EVER use the term.

I've noticed a lot of 12 year olds like this book. That's about the demographic it's written for.

Rating:
Summary: I'm a tree-hugger, and I loved it. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Review: I didn't realize for years that Mr. Clancy had written other books in the Ryan universe besides _The Hunt for Red October,_ and I kicked myself when I found out what I had been missing: lots of big fat good books with equal portions brain and heart. This one took some getting into, though, because I am a granola treehugging eagles-belong-downtown envirofeminist myself. (Belong downtown? In my little Alaskan town, they crap on the cars. Everybody in the U.S. should have the privilege of wiping bald eagle crap off of their own automobile.) But on rereading, I got a chill down my spine.

Any deeply held belief system can be coopted by the taint in the human soul and turned into a Cause, as in Anything For The. Clancy's genius shows in the way he created a believable charismatic human monster in the historic tradition, but gave him a Cause for the 21st century. It made me reexamine my dismissal of the wackaloons of the environmental movement. All they need is a demagogue.

The lesser monsters who cluster around John Brightling have their finely drawn individual freakishness as well. They remind me of Hitler's supporting cast, and I suspect that that was the author's model. You have the man who scarcely blinks at human death but flinches at the deaths of small animals; the self-indulgent brute who murders rather than restrain his appetite; the enthusiastic planners who are so in love with the big picture that they find it easy to ignore its horrible scaffolding; the dreamers who really believe that their personal obsessions justify the bloody overthrow of civilization. I entertained myself on a hot afternoon by imagining life in the Kansas facility in a plotline where the Project succeeded. Then I shuddered and went out into the sunlight.

The musings of various Project members are some of Clancy's finest bits of irony to date. I liked the media room for the use of the grandchildren of the Anointed--as if fresh videotapes would spring up next to the strawberries. And the idea that the most important thing to consider, when trying to feed several thousand people on local resources, would be recipes. And the ark built by radical environmentalists that requires petroleum to keep out the deadly Kansas winter. And so on.

But Clancy is scrupulously fair. There is the brown smudge. There was the Exxon Valdez disaster. (The way a denizen of the Wonderland Beyond the Beltway drastically underestimates its scale and severity even while using it as an excuse for murder is another fine bit of irony.) There is the inescapable legacy of nuclear waste. There is the way mine tailings put arsenic in drinking water. It is human nature to use hard facts in the service of convenient lies. Clancy uses them instead to tell a whacking good story that leaves you thinking about the contradictions of humanity. He does this a lot. Go buy. Go read.

Rating:
Summary: Death wish for humanity
Review: "Rainbow Six" is an excellent book for one main reason: it accurately captures the ideological and religious core of the environmental movement.

Clancy is the first popular novelist to accurately capture the eco-fascism and hatred for all humans at the core of the green religion. The quotes at the end of this review are often reflected in the paraphrased statements used in the book. The lack of true science behind the environmental 'scare of the month' is also realistically captured throughout the book.

What comes through again and again in the book, especially in the ruminations by Popov, probably the most interesting character, is the all too true similarity of the Green movement to the Red (Communist) and Brown (Fascist) parties. Understanding this enables one to fully appreciate both the irony, and the appropriateness, of Popov's critical actions in the last half of the book. (Popov is a former KGB agent). That makes for some real page-turning reading. Interesting also is the very real threat to national security that the eco-'true believers' pose when they are appointed to political posts. If humans no longer matter, why should we try to protect them?

For those who consider Clancy's plot too extreme a dose of reality is reflected in these quotes from the eco-extremists themselves:

"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

In a 1994 UNESCO publication Jacques Cousteau stated: "It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it."

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill," declared members of the Club of Rome in a sweeping 1991 report on global governance." All these dangers are caused by human intervention.... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

Rating:
Summary: Tree huggers will hate it-isn't that great news!
Review: I stopped reading Clancy after about his fourth or fifth book (all enjoyable reads) just for a break as I stopped reading Grisham after about the same number of good reads. I got this for my birthday and was reluctant to read it......but after a severe quad muscle strain that left me imobilized for 4-5 weeks, I dove in! Glad I did! This is a long (900 pages) but outstanding page turner! Classic Clancy that goes after environmental nazis! And what they do to them in the end is a classic twist of the unexpected! Get through the first 200-250 pages of introductions of characters, sub plots, and themes and away you go into the world of international terrorism, counterterrorism, technological equipment with cool applications, etc......a pot of gold awaits at the end of this rainbow!

Rating:
Summary: Tom Clancy's first screenplay
Review: This reads more like a screenplay than a novel. The book opens up with a James Bond-type scene, where the main heroes are established by defusing a hijacking that has no bearing on the rest of the book. Clark seems to have developed telepathy, as he figured out that the pilot was ex-USAF instead of ex-USN just by the expression in his eyes. Yeah, right, it felt like Clancy was just trying to atone for dissing the USAF in all his other novels.

The plot develops just like a movie. The Rainbow team is established and trains for a while. Then they get called to respond to some terrorist situations. Three, if I recall, and no good guys went down. Everybody's happy. So at this point, we should expect their next mission to go all wrong. And sure enough, it does. What a surprise. Then on the climactic mission, the bad guys seem to have the upper hand until our intrepid heroes summon their Rocky-like strength and defeat the bad guys. Movie over. Whoops, I mean "book over."

I expect this book to be adapted for the big screen, since Clancy clearly wrote it like a typical movie where nothing surprises you. Having said all this, it's filled with the usual Clancy goodies, which makes it enjoyable. But the Hollywood plotline is so disappointing. Having read all of his novels, I'd say that Rainbow Six is the book that jumped the shark. Clancy is simply becoming a lazy writer.