Rating: 
Summary: Tick Tick Tick Boom!
Review: I read this book long before Oklahoma City... long before 9-11... and before the movie-version came out, which is why I got excited about it actually coming to the box office. I wanted to see what parts of Clancy's intricately laid plot would make it past the cutting room floor. Indeed, the movie was very good, and one I recommend highly, but in typical Hollywood-style, it varies from the book - widely so. The bad guys are not even the same; the terrorists in the book were not modern day German-Nazis using poor Middle-eastern farmers and hiring, then killing Russian scientists. (Instead, the scientists are German and Clancy's original bad guys are closer to 9-11 reality, which makes me wonder why the change back to a WWII "Axis Powers" concept in the movie?) In the book, the bomb is not hidden in a vending machine and it does not blow up on the East Coast at Boston, but deep in "our nation's heartland"...giving new meaning to Mile High Stadium. (Except for the type of bomb, Timothy McVeigh got closer to Clancy's plot than the movie does.) So... yes, if you like intricate details to a life-or-death suspenseful puzzle, I recommend the book over the movie. But, the movie is-for obvious reasons-much faster paced. I admit the book is long and very, very (did I stress, very) detailed. So, it's not a "fast" read. You can't skim scenes without the risk of missing some vital clue. It bounces around from lumberjacks cutting down a tree to a sub deep in the ocean to Arabic farmers digging in the desert sands, and it's hundreds of pages before you find out how everything ties together... but the SUM of it all is a very thrilling climax to a story that I pray never becomes reality, although it's already come closer than I like to admit. Unfortunately, Jack Ryan wasn't part of that reality. :)
Rating: 
Summary: Tough to get through but worth it!
Review: Sum of All Fears is right up there with the other great Clancy books like Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger. The book can get buried in details (don't all Clancy books?), but if you can get through the technical nuclear bomb building details, the last 1/4 is as good as it gets.
Rating: 
Summary: The Sum of All Fears
Review: The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy has a marvelous plot but falls short of being a stunning success. The beginning of the book is very slow and a few times I thought about throwing it away. The first 400 to 500 pages of the book are filled with character introductions that where so in-depth I forgot which character he was trying to explain. Another aspect of the book that I did not like was the wording Clancy tries to introduce in every chapter, like he knows every secret detail of the government. This rubbish just slows the book down even more. Still hopeful, I kept with it and the plot picked up as I hoped. Progressing into the second half of the book, a lot of the earlier chapters finally begin to take shape. The last 300 pages of the book is the best part. What happens at the end is unbelievable and opened my eyes to what kind of threats the government must deal with, specifically terrorist acts. The scary thing is that what happens in the book could very well happen in real life. All and all the book was a slow read at first but picked up to be a non-stop thriller.
Rating:
Summary: The books is better than the movie
Review: I read the book the first time when it first came out and spend a lot of sleepless night reading just one more chapter before I went to sleep.
I saw the movie and it shares two things with the book, a terrorist bomb and Jack Ryan, and little else. I understand that they had to find someone to play the part and when they got someone younger they rewrote everything.
The book is about a terrorist act on US soil, a President who cannot lead, an national security advisor who is totally incompetent and Jack Ryan.
Take away Jack Ryan and Tom Clancy was a prophet about 9-11.
Rating:
Summary: It IS Clancy's best book!
Review: The SOAF is Tom Clancy's best novel. It has some very chilling geopolitical subplots, amazing technical precision and personal drama, all created effectively on a grand scale. Sure, AS ALWAYS, it takes some time to get rollin', but it's not too mundane, the pace is quite okay after the first 100 pages. And the climax is totally breathtaking - that's what makes this book a sure winner. Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: First and Last Clancy Novel
Review: This was my first Tom Clancy novel, and it will be the last. Very one-dimensional, cliche characters. Clancy's attempt to insert conflict into Jack Ryan (self-doubt, too much drinking, impotence, etc.) was forced and superficial. Way too much technical detail that did not serve to advance the story in any meaningful way. It was very hard for me to suspend my disbelief -- way too many "convenient" coincidences that served to bolster an already exaggerated plot. No wonder why this was made into a cheesy, overblown Hollywood blockbuster with talentless actors. Look elsewhere for mind-expanding literature.
Rating:
Summary: Not Clancy's best
Review: Even though this book has a believable storyline, it is a slow read. The first 600 pages go incredibly slow. It is not until the last part of the book that the pace picks up. I am a Tom Clancy fan and have read the entire Jack Ryan series, but believe that this book was overly technical for no useful reason, which did not add to its readability. It could have could have and should have been streamlined. I much preferred Clear and Present Danger. I also recommend Vince Flynn as an up and coming political thriller writer.
Rating:
Summary: A scenario of nightmares...
Review: Its post Cold War, and though many of us, most in fact, feel the threat of the nuclear age fade with each day Clancey brings to light the dangers that we may still face. As detailed and suspensfully as ever, TC has brought to life a world drama that seems as plausible as it does outrageous. Dr. Jack Ryan is Deputy Director of the CIA and working closely with the White House. Things remain tumultous in the middle east, Russia is struggling with a newfound government that is fighting to survive, Japan is turning tricks in the trade game, and the intel world is as alive as ever. Clancey takes us into the Oval Office and shows us, with uncomfortable ease, the frightening reality of a human president and his cabinent members. Clancey has a way of twisting the unknown into what could be our biggest nightmare. The secrets that are held within the governments of the world seem even larger to those of us that are blissfully unaware of them in our everyday life. In a time when our nation seems on edge about the events and terrorists abroad, perhaps the largest threat lies within our own boarders...
Rating:
Summary: a bit boring but still good
Review: This book was the first book of clancy that i had ever read, and as soon as i read it i read debt of honor exc honor and some others. the one bad thing is that for people who nothing about miltary stuff it can get a bit long in parts. Still a good read though
Rating: 
Summary: Someone please nuke me and make it stop....
Review: OMIGOD this book is boring!! Now, don't get me wrong. I love read-it-on-the-beach-and-who-cares-if-you-spill-lotion-on-it fiction and, up to now, I've loved Tom Clancy. But SOAF is out of control. Even for this book's immense girth, every character remains resolutely wooden, including Jack Ryan -- who, for some (never explained) reason, has become fat, alcoholic, dyspeptic, disillusioned, and impotent. (Don't worry: his brilliant yet spunky wife changes all that -- literally overnight.) And yet the book goes on and on and on. Early in the novel, the bad guys building a nuclear bomb reveal that the project may take 10 months. Not to fret, though -- you won't miss a minute of those ten months, because Clancy takes you through each and every tedious day. Suckled, as he now is, on screenplays, he has also forgotten that scene, place, and time changes in novels don't come with captions or establishing shots: He jerks you from one place to the next without bothering to write so much as a single transition sentence. If he were in my writing classes, I'd fail him. Though others have called the premise of this book "realistic," I could never bring myself to fall for it. For one thing, I never understood why the "terrorists" were doing what they were doing. (Oh. Because they're terrorists. Now I see....) And Clancy's pious little Afterword, in which he admonishes us to take seriously the perils we face in the aftermath of nuclear proliferation -- it was to laugh, my friends. Really. It's not that I don't think some nut job somewhere might get a hold of plutonium and figure out how to make a bomb. It's that I don't think a bloated, overwritten novel is the way to address the issue. Tom Clancy's bio brags that he's the advisor to presidents. Good. Go explain the problem to Dubya. Cuz right now the sum of all my fears is that Tom Clancy will go on writing like this.
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