Rating: 
Summary: What if terrorists used a virus to get back at the U.S.?
Review: What if terrorists used a virus to get back at the U.S.? That's the situation Jack Ryan, the new President of the United States, finds himself in. After a decapitating kamikaze attack on the U.S. Capitol, which decimated Congress and killed the previous POTUS, Roger Durling, his wife, and most of Congress. The American people, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. Ryan, who was sworn in as President at the end of Debt of Honor, takes charge when Iran, under the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, decides to strike at the United States. Using the deadliest virus around, the Ebola virus, which makes AIDS look like a picnic by comparison, he sends suicide squads to the United States to retaliate against the new President. This golden opportunity arises when Saddam Hussein's assassinated by one of his bodyguards and Iraq is absorbed by Iran creating a new country--the United Islamic Republic. When the Army of God, supposedly on maneuvers, invades Saudi Arabia, Ryan sends the reactivated Ninth ACR to Saudi Arabia to defend the kingdom. Mr. Clark and his protege, Ding Chavez, use a laser to paint Daryaei's house and guide laser- designated nuclear bombs dropped by two Stealth fighters on it while Ryan's giving a speech to the American people and lecturing Daryaei on how not to conduct a war. At the end of his speech, the bombs explode on Daryaei's house. Destroying it. After two battles of King Khalid Military City, the UIR crumbles and disintigrates. At his press conference, he's asked about the new leader of Iran. He answers the question and is then asked if he intends to run. Ryan says yes. Blair Colquhoun @cybertours.com on it
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely worth a miss
Review: I have never seen such a beautiful amalgamation of half-baked jingoistic ideas. A badly written novel, that should have been cut down to half its current size, merely suggests that Mr.Clancy should consider early retirement if he can not work hard on his storytelling.
Rating: 
Summary: 1358 pages, for what?
Review: Tom Clancy is running out of steam. After great books like "Red October" and "Real and Present Danger", he is now apparently being paid by the word. I read a movie review once where the writer said the film felt like they got tired of filming it and just pushed it off a cliff. This book felt exactly that way to me. Clancy has shown great talent for weaving multiple plots and story lines together into fabulous finales, but the multiple plots here came to unsatisfying dead-ends. Millitia guys scout Washington D.C. targets and build a huge truck bomb only to be stopped by a roadblock. No arrest, no story, just a roadblock, end of story line. Kidnappings go nowhere. Plagues fizzle out. An international incident with India just goes away. A challenge to Ryan's presidency by the previous Vice President, after hundreds of pages of development, just disappears. A "Gulf War 2" ends when the Americans and their severely depleted forces simply wipe out the opposing armies. When the novel is not tedious and unsatisfting it is un believable. The leader of a soveriegn nation, (although a criminal), is blown up on international T.V. I stopped reading this book at about 700 pages when nothing had happened, but forced myself to finish it because I had NEVER in my life given up on a book. It was wasted time that I will never get back.
Rating:
Summary: A definite must for all Tom Clancy fans!
Review: I never could believe that anybody would out do Tom Clancy but neither could I have expected him to out do himself. That is exactly what he's done in 'Executive Orders'. The book starts off from where 'Debt of Honour' left off. Jack Ryan, now the President of the United States has to deal with more threats than any President in history. From danger to his own life and that of his family's to widespread danger aimed at the whole nation. All this and more brings 'Executive Orders' to a thrilling climax, worthy only of Tom Clancy.
Rating:
Summary: Zzzzzz...
Review: I begin this review with a quick defense of Mr.Clancy. In many of these reviews, readers have criticized Clancy's at-times clunky writing style, his one-dimesional characters, his stilted dialogue, and his intrusive political diatribes. It's hard to argue these points. But Clancy is not creating high art. If I want to have my soul uplifted or my eyes opened to a wider world, I'll read Proust or Austen. When I want to read about an A-10 firing a Maverick missile at a T-80 main battle tank (MBT), I'll pick up one of Clancy's books. The way he's going, however, I'll need a forklift next time. Granted that all of Clancy's characters (the good-guy American ones, anyway) speak like John Wayne after a few shots of Redeye, and Jack and Cathy Ryan are the most absurdly and disgustingly perfect couple this side of Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford (pre-stewardess scandal), and Clancy's politics are Cro-Magnon and his attitudes toward women are Neaderthal, I am still willing to forgive him all this if he is ENTERTAINING! When I pick up a Tom Clancy novel I expect jets will be dropping bombs and Presidents will be ordering bombs dropped and spies will be, uh, finding out where the bombs should be dropped. I want to read about ridiculously expensive high-tech weapons and what happens when they get pointed at people and used in anger. I'm willing to forgive his faults if Clancy brings his obvious skills as a plotter and detailer of neato high-tech wizbangs to bear. But somewhere along the way, I think it was somewhere in the middle of "Clear and Present Danger", something went terribly wrong. Apparently, Clancy started believing that everyone bought his books because of HIM, not because of what he was writing about. And so he cranked out the laborious "Sum of All Fears", in which he wiped out the Super Bowl with a nuke (I'm from Pittsburgh, I wouldn't have any problems if that happened this year. Stupid Broncos). Then came "Debt of Honor", which ends with a kamikaze (of course) enacting his own term-limitation legislation with a 747. After lugging that tome around im my bag for three weeks I had people asking me if I was working out, I had bulked up so much. And then came along "Executive Orders". This book makes "Debt of Honor" look like Cliff Notes. The print is even smaller, for cryin' out loud. In normal format it's like 4,000 pages long. It looks like a copy of the Federal Tax Codes. The book frightened me, just by it's size. But I live on the edge, and after a trip to my doctor for a physical I attacked. I did want to see just what would happen to poor Jack Ryan, to poor America, after the decapitation of our government. What happens in the book? Wrong question. What DOESN'T happen? Clancy takes 30 or 40 plots and weaves them together with the skill of a master egotist. Can someone explain why the Iranians would want to kill Ryan AND kidnap his daughter? You have a country that's already a bit edgy over the murder of the entire government and is bristling with enough nukes to flash-fry your entire country, and you're gonna snatch his kid? The idea could be expanded into a thriller of its own, but that is but one of the countless stories going on and on and ON in this mess of a book. Many of these reviews have mentioned that there was obviously no editing for this book. Well, what did you expect after "Debt of Honor". I mean, come on, what editor is going to tell mega-seller Clancy, "Uh, Tom, you could cut the entire part with the Mountain Men, and it wouldn't change the rest of the book and it would keep the pulse of the book from stopping completely." Right. You just know that some poor slob at Clancy's publishers had to edit this (I doubt the bigwigs would wade through 700 pounds of galleys). The editor probably makes $35,000 a year and lives in some painted-over crack house in Manhattan and he's going to be the one to offend Mr.Megaseller? No way. In the end, "EO" committed the cardinal sin of fiction--it bored me. I was 500 pages in, with 500 to go, and I didn't want to continue. I finished the book out of pure spite, to see how bad it would get, and it got plenty bad. I dread the newest Clancy book, because I'll probably buy it. And I'll probably waste $30 and countless hours getting through it. I'll buy it because I'm an optimist. I'll buy it hoping that Clancy will learn from the criticism of his last few books, that he'll tighten up his plotting and not try to shoehorn every thought that has struck him the past 3 years into the book. But I bought the last few books, and if I buy this one, all I'll be doing is reinforcing his crummy writing. Sigh. What can you do? I close by apologizing for going on so long in a review complaining about an author going on for so long. I will do my best to keep my next review under 800 pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Tom Clancy delivers what National Leadership should be.
Review: Having read all of Tom Clancy's books I eagerly awaited Executive Orders. The book itself is an outstanding follow-on to Debt of Honor. While some would view Jack Ryan as the Super Human American, what I think they totally miss is that Jack Ryan is a picture of what the American Presidency ought to be. In particular, I notice is that Clancy goes to great lenghts to show that America has no problem with religion or faith of any kind, but that hiding behind it will not save you from the judgement you deserve when you commit crimes of mass death and destruction. Clancy blends a great cast of characters, all with strengths and weaknesses, including Jack Ryan, who finds himself tripping more over his dealings with the press than those dealings with other national leaders.
The book is a display of Tom Clancys obvious knowledge of the agencies within the government who make up all parts of the Presidential decision making process. The reader will gain great insight to the stresses and pitfalls of being one of the most powerful leaders in the world who lives in a glass house with cameras all around.
The book is a classic winner. I greatly look forward to the next. Jack Ryan for President!
Rating:
Summary: Not exciting all the way, but nevertheless a good book!
Review: If you tend to feel sick when you read about the great American patriotism, you really do yourself a favour by avoiding this book. I myself find the Americans to be some of the most superficial and irritating people on this planet. But I still read the book from cover to cover, and I must admit that Tom Clancy knows how to thrill. OK, so I still couldn't help laughing at the Americans' "self-acclaimed human superiority". Use your sence of humour and you too will enjoy this book.:)
Rating:
Summary: Clancy has done great with Executive Orders!
Review: EXECUTIVE ORDERS was the first Tom Clancy book that I have ever read, but I found that he is one of the best authors in America. It amazes me how much knowledge he has on the workings of the United States government, the military, military tactics, and so on. He perfectly blends horror, action, science, politics, and humanity to form this fantastic novel. You will find that this book is very difficult to put down. I suggest that you buy this book if you like political thrillers, action, and shock. Even if those are not your interests, I think that all will enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Clancy has done it once again!
Review: An electric and fascinating insight on the US Presidency. This was superb, the only flaws being the India-China angle which seemed to go nowhere and the Grade Z Mountain Men which are right out of a junior school essay. Ignoring those, the way Jack Ryan becomes President, forms a government out of the people that are left after Sato`s kamikaze attack on the Capitol, and the way he slips up when dealing with issues such as criminal justice and abortion are highly realistic. The Ebola Zaire plot and the United Islamic Republic angle are both extremely well crafted, even if the idea does seem as though it was copied from the movie Outbreak at times. Mind you, the monkey culling scenes and the description of the effects of the disease made that movie seem like pure Disney. Overall though, this book is one you`ll need plenty of time to read because despite the odd flaw, it has the Tom Clancy trademark of being extremely hard to put down! Jack Ryan should return for another term of Presidency, but what crisis can Clancy cook up this time?!
Rating:
Summary: Yawn
Review: It's really too bad that Jack Ryan didn't die heroically and honorably when Captain Torajiro Sato dropped his 747 squarely on the Capitol rotunda. Had he done so, we would have been spared the interminable ennui that this book produced. The more I read, the less convincing President Ryan became, and by the time I finished, I was rather hoping that someone - anyone - would blow up the world and end this farce. Allen Drury discovered in the sequels to his superb Advise and Consent that major characters lose their impetus as well as credibility. Clancy got away with expanding his main character a couple times with very good results. But the Ryan presidency is a clinker - barely worth the effort to plod through a zillion pages of pseudo intellectual Rambo. The "battle" scenes generate an interesting question. We all know that Larry Bond was the uncredited co-author of Red Storm Rising, which is probably the best of all "Clancy" works. The battle scenes in RSR, whether on land or air, were crisp and carried an air of reality and excitement. The best that can be said about the battle scenes in Executive Orders is that they are blah, dull, and mainly boring. One must wonder how much of Red Storm Rising is the intellectual property of Larry Bond, and not Tom Clancy.
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