Rating: 
Summary: The World is Not Safe
Review: For years, Tom Clancy has been writing novels that tie into each other through certain characters. The linking character in Rainbow Six, John Clark, is seen in previous novels such as Clear and Present Danger and Without Remorse. John Clark is the head of a new international counter-terrorism unit designated as Rainbow. Domingo Chavez is Clark's right hand man and son-in-law. Clark, charged with the task of running and maintaining all aspects of this Rainbow team, has Chavez as the leader of Team-2 of two teams. Over their first six months of operation, they respond to four seemingly unconnected incidents. The last of these occurs at the hospital at which Clark and Chavez's wives work. A group of PIRA terrorists (Irish-Catholic) receive inside information on Rainbow, which is supposed to be 'black', or secret. They succeed in hurting Rainbow, but are all captured or killed in the process. Unbeknownst to Clark, these incidents have been secretly planned by John Brightling, the CEO of the pharmaceuticals company Horizon Corp. These attacks serve Brightling's purpose by getting his right hand man the security contract for the 2001 Olympics so they may carry out a world-threatening plan to end life as we know it. From here the story takes twists and turns through the plot, always throwing in something different. An important part of the plot, the setting takes you around the world, from a Swiss bank to the jungles of Brazil; Clancy describes each location with vivid detail and great precision.Rainbow Six is a startling story of conspiracy of a large scale, covert international operations, and espionage. Tom Clancy incorporates all of these elements into an enthralling turn of events driven by strategic switches between characters' points of view that keep the story from stagnating. All aspects of the story are adequately detailed, from the operational procedures of the British MI5 to the workings of the H&K MP10 sub-machinegun. I highly recommend the suspense/action novel Rainbow Six to those that like suspense, mystery, and action compressed into one book. For the Tom Clancy readers, this is one of his best yet.
Rating:
Summary: Highly entertaining read
Review: This is my second favorite Clancy novel, right after "Without Remorse". Ignore the complaints of the whiny tree-huggers about Clancy's portrayal of environmentalists in the novel, they're really that bad. The book was highly entertaining and an enjoyable read. If only we had a Rainbow team to deal with Earth First and Greenpeace (we should take a lesson from the French in how to deal with Greenpeace).
Rating: 
Summary: Loving, caring, intelligent cold-blooded killers
Review: I've read quite a few of Tom Clancy's books and liked most of them. But this one really bothered me. The book is about an anti-terrorist group called Rainbow, and describes their training and abilities. We follow them on several of their missions where they demonstrate their talent at putting three bullets into the head of each terrorist in the wink of an eye. You see Rainbow is based on military principles, not police concepts or laws against murder, so there are no silly rules about "hands up, drop your weapon!" Just get close enough to shoot and then shoot to kill. All well and good, and I'm sure that if I was ever taken hostage by terrorists that I'd welcome the arrival of a group of highly-skilled cold-blooded killers who would take care of my problem. The thing that bothers me is that Tom Clancy wants us to believe that these same guys who make their living killing other human beings are loving, caring husbands and fathers, and they experience no conflict between their occupation and their family life. This is apparently very important to Clancy because he goes on and on about what wonderful family fathers all of these guys are. They're all married and all have children and all of them have the wife and kids stationed on the outskirts of the army camp where Rainbow is based. Clancy describes, for example, how the members of Rainbow feel no regret when they come home from a hard day of slaughter. When wifey, watching the TV coverage, asks, "did you actually kill any of them?" they brush it off with, "you don't really want to know, and anyway, I'm on the side of the angels, remember?" I don't think this is very realistic, to put it mildly. Most of what I've read about Special Forces personnel, and especially the ones who have actually been in combat and killed in the line of duty, is that they make lousy husbands and fathers. Which is OK - a civilized society needs some uncivilized nasties to keep the other nasties at bay. I just don't see why Clancy feels the need to claim that you shouldn't mind having your daughter marry one of these killers. Clancy also wants us to believe that these guys are intellectuals. For example, Ding, the leader of one of the two Rainbow teams, has a Masters degree, and his wife is a medical doctor! And what sort of daily problems does Ding have which needs great intelligence and a Masters degree? Well, he does spend some time thinking over whether he should do more target practicing with his automatic rifle or his handgun. The art of killing terrorists is obviously something that not just any old idiot can do right! Another aspect of the book's lack of realism has to do with the fact that being a terrorist killer is not without its risks. At one point two of the Rainbow team members get killed, and we're presumably supposed to believe that their wives and children take the loss of their loving, caring, intellectual husbands and fathers in stride. They died serving a greater cause so their loss is to be accepted. Uh-huh? And why were these loving, caring, intelligent men so dumb that they got into a line of work where there was a high chance of them turning their loving, caring, intellectual wives into widows and leaving their children fatherless? I realize that I've focused on just one particular aspect of this book, but it's an aspect that Clancy apparently considered very important, and which I found very unrealistic and thus very irritating. To make things worse, Clancy managed to irritate me in another way in this book. The bad guys in the book are a bunch of environmentalists who have gone off the deep end in their desire to get back to Nature. That's OK, but what I didn't like is that Clancy obviously has no use for environmentalists in general. The good guys consistently refer to all environmentalists as "tree-huggers" and imply that anybody who worries about the ozone layer or the future of our planet is stupid. A very dangerous and shortsighted attitude. No more Tom Clancy for me for a while.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm not impressed.
Review: What Rainbow Six amounts to is a 900 page sermon on the widespread and rampant leftist terrorism that plagues the world today. Never mind that it's right wing extremists such as Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein that have given the world so much trouble since the collapse of communism. If the preaching isn't bad enough, consider the barrage of two dimensional characters. The heros have no personality whatsoever. They are basically automatons going around killing the equally shallow bad guys. Clancy might know that even soldiers have feelings and individuality, had he not been a draft dodger himself. Clancy is an author I would compare to Arthur C. Clarke, in that both are fully competant with the technical side of what they write, but seem to be incapable of expressing any real emotion in their work. With Clancy the world is just a black and white place where communists still hide under the beds of all God-fearing people and governments do no wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: Tom Clancy at his best
Review: If your looking for a good book to read Rainbow six is it! Rainbow six has pleanty of action it with a great plot. I think this book will entertain you a lot if your into Tom Clancy's type of stories. I liked the book a lot because this book isnt boring as some of his other books. Sometimes Tom Clancy will go on and on with some people's thoughts but thats about the only bad part. Tom Clancy made a book that makes perfect sence for a possible futer terrorist attack. If you dont like Jack Ryan thats ok because he's hardly ever mentioned in this book. I can give you what the book is about but I dont want to give the story away either. This book is about a bunch of genuis terrorist trying to kill all humans on earth. These terrorist try to do it with an KGB. They make a bunch of terrorist attacks in Europe so the Rainbow team will focus mainly on those kind of attacks for the olympics in Sydney. Rainbow is like the SAS but they fight agains terrorism. There base is in England. Anyways when the Olympics arrive the terrorist try to kill the people by puting a deadly chemical called Shivia in a mist system to help cool off the people in the Olympic stadium. Of course you know the bad guys wont win but how they get caught is awesome. I recomend this book to you because once you start reading the book you wont stop reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I feel that Tom Clancy did a great job on this book, and it definetaly diserves 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: excellent. Grabs you and doesn't let go. Realistic plot and action packed story.
A must read.
Rating:
Summary: Clancy keeps writing good books
Review: Over the course of the past year and a half, I've been slowly working my way through the Tom Clancy novels. Now that I have finished Rainbow Six , I only have two left. If you have read other Clancy novels, you know what kind of book this is. The pacing is somewhat faster than other Clancy novels, but nowhere near as fast as Without Remorse. Now that Jack Ryan is President of the United States, Rainbow Six switches the focus back onto CIA operative John Clark. Clark has made appearances in most of the Jack Ryan series, as well as being the focus of Without Remorse. With the permission and blessing of multiple nations, John Clark is the head of a multi-national anti-terrorism group named Rainbow (Clark, being an intelligence man, has the code name of Six). Rainbow is split into two teams, one of them headed by Clark's partner and former CIA office, Domingo (Ding) Chavez. These teams are trained and authorized to respond to terrorist actions across Europe (or anywhere else in the world). As Rainbow is formed is begins to come together, there are more high profile terrorist actions. Rainbow responds, perfectly. At the same time, there is a plotline focusing on a team of scientists developing a virus to kill most of the population of the planet (yes, we've all seen that movie before, but Clancy makes it semi-believable). Tom Clancy weaves together several plotlines into a gripping narrative and makes for very interesting reading. I'm reluctant to put this book near the top of the list in terms of Clancy's best work, but this is a very solid novel and Clancy seldom writes .... This is quite good. Definitely worth a read, if you are a fan of Tom Clancy.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh. You have to be kidding me.
Review: Clancy has officially hit rock bottom. I couldn't believe how ridiculously one-sided this book was. The good guys are perfect, and the bad guys have the emotional intelligence of a six-year-old. I'm hoping that the American military doesn't have the same perception of our enemies as Clancy does. What really bothers me is that even some of the most successful special forces operations in history--especially those which took place in such public settings as what is described in Rainbow Six--had a few things go wrong; hostages were killed and soldiers were injured. Some even completely fell apart. Clancy apparently either didn't do his homework on this or simply chose to disregard it. I was really, REALLY disappointed in this book. I am (or maybe was) a huge Clancy fan, and while the technical details were still there to satisfy a hard-core military techno-geek, the story was somewhat absurd, and the dialogue is bad, even for Clancy.
Rating:
Summary: Fairly Good
Review: I loved this book, except for the end. It is a very shameful ending for such a good book introduction and general plot. Since the first chapters of the book, Clancy creates a very good atmosphere of intrigue with an issue related to alcoholic homeless people. It carries on with this idea the whole book, and in the end when it should've been exploited to create an amazing climax, Clancy throws everything away with a very lacking of suspense scene. But it does have some good things, so if you want to read a good book about international terrorism, this is a good book, but don't expect to much of the ending.
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