Rating: 
Summary: One of the best of the Jack Ryan novels
Review: One of the earliest Jack Ryan novels and one of the best. Tom Clancy weaves a dynamic and realistic tale of terrorism. The story is fairly well known, but overall its' a tense and thrilling story. A terrorist incident perpetrated by radical Irish terrorist is foiled by an American tourist. That begins a story fo revenge, danger and fanaticism. While there is plenty of techinical information, Clancy had not yet perfected the technical technique. Most of the characters who are present in other Clancy novels do not make an appearance, but some of the staples of a Clancy story appear, including Admiral Greer and Dan Murrey. OVerall it's an incredible story and and one that I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite books
Review: This was the first Tom Clancy book that I read, and it got me hooked on the Jack Ryan series. When I picked up this book I couldn't put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreadful book and movie....
Review: I can now see why the 1992 movie was so awful, the book is a dredful piece of words to read. The plot wanders on aimlessly and all the charecters including Ryan, his wife, and daughter are well, Robots.They do not generate any emotion from the reader at all.Tom Clancy was good when he put the "techno" in the techno-thriller, but with this book, he tried to write just plain old drama, with charecters that were created for the wrong genre.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs some editing
Review: It's my habit with books that are made into films that I like to see the film first, then read the book to get the rest of the story. Inevitably large chunks of the written story have to be cut out for the sake of time, and Patriot Games is another that falls into this category. It's also one of those stories that gets reworked rather radically for the screen, but the filmmakers fortunately were able to capture the general tone of this novel quite well, I think. That makes the movie introduction of two major characters, and the deletion/reduction of several others, more palatable. Patriot Games has the distinction of being one of the few such works I've read/seen that manage to be very different yet quite satisfying in both media, and in fact there's so much fat in the novel that was trimmed out for the screenplay that it makes the reader positively yawn at some points.
Hey, far be it from me to squawk about the length of a novel. I mean, Crime and Punishment remains a personal fave, and it drones on and on.....but does so in an excrutiatingly fascinating way.
The main flaw in Patriot Games, however, is that it does go on a bit too much, wandering sometimes into places where it has no business. But that one flaw, however distracting, cannot change the fact that Clancy does an expert job of drawing the characters with such fine brush strokes and detailing the action so carefully that his pace works beautifully, so that the too-slow first half of the book gives way to a compelling final few chapters. Still, it's a good thing I'm patient or I would've given up too soon.
In reading Patriot Games, one cannot help but visualize Harrison Ford, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, etc., in the roles written by Clancy in this story of Irish terrorism, written in 1987 long before Middle East problems so rudely interrupted our blindly idyllic American bliss. An IRA splinter group has been thwarted in a violent attempt at the Royal Family (thinly veiled Charles & Diana, back when they seemed happy), and our hero Jack Ryan is the one who stopped them. The motivations are different in the film, and more compelling, actually, one of the rare moments when I believe a screenwriter improves on his/her source material.
God bless Clancy for his stubborn insistence on making the heroes of this story out to be real heroes, rather than the flawed antiheroes of our recent past, and for showing us a married couple who is still madly in love and passionate for each other sexually, Charles & Di notwithstanding. Most storytellers in various media seem intent on showing that unmarried sex and romance are more exciting, which is usually bunk, and Jack & Cathy Ryan are fictitious personifications of this.
I'm giving Patriot Games a very mixed almost-four stars, because it did gather enough steam to become a real page-turner, but I really prefer the perfectly-paced movie version. Somebody really needed to trim the fat for Clancy, and apparently it took a screenplay to keep his story from meandering too far.
Rating:
Summary: Must Read!
Review: This book is excellent. I have read two other Clancy books before and this was my first plunge into the so-called Jack Ryan series. It absolutely confirmed my interest in this series. I recommend any reader interested in counter-terrorism and military action to read this work.
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Summary: My first Clancy novel. Still my favorite.
Review: After this I found Tom Clancy's novels unnecessarily long and sometimes rather boring when he goes into long passages of Military descriptions and technical info. There's fifteen pages in Executive Decision devoted solely to explaining how Jack Ryan is drinking his coffee. That's a bit much, and explains why his novel was over 1200 pages long.However before he went overboard Clancy struck gold with this one. Addictive, sometimes a bit boring but with a killer ending (literally!). Better than the movie. I own all of Clancy's books - this is still my favorite.
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