The Teeth of the Tiger

Rating:
Summary: Why would you nag on the best??
Review: "Lost his Touch" "Can't Be Clancy". This is what you have been hearing lately, from reviews for Red Rabbit and Teeth of the Tiger. Teeth of the tiger is a good story, with a great start, that makes the book a item of addiction. I will admit that this is not Patriot Games (my favorite), but did you ever think that Tom could write about Jack Patrick Ryan forever?? Poeple think that Ryan has an unlimited amount of possibilities. A man can only be president for so long. He can only be a spook for so long. This book may also be a placement book. He can set up a situation, and then he has created a block of time where he can possible write anouther Ryan story.

Rating:
Summary: Could the REAL Tom Clancy actually have written this ??
Review: this book is thin, sophmoric and vapid at best. the hardcover is "bulked-up" by the publisher with heavy paper stock and large type spacing to appear to be more than it is. It still doesn't work. They must have been desperate to get something printed to bring in money.
SAVE YOURS. If you must read it, get it from the library. If you are a devotee of the "earlier" Clancy, as I am, don't bother with this tripe, you'll feel cheated and sorry for the depths his recent works have fallen.
It was tough to give it one star.........

Rating:
Summary: The Hunt for Tom Clancy
Review: I was a fan before Red October became a huge success but am surpised by how terrible this "novel" really is. Predictable, bad plot, bad dialog, too many clashes with reality (hard to get lost in a book when it keeps screaming at you that it is fiction). Would the real Tom Clancy please step forward?

Rating:
Summary: What happened???
Review: I have been reading Clancy's novels for the past 10 years and generally thought of his writing as simple but entertaining. Then new ventures such as Net-Force, etc. "happened" which were weak but also easliy avoided. The core line with the Ryan books was kept at a decent level - unti now.
Mr. Clancy, what happened? This should at best have been a free promotional chapter for a good upcoming book. To make matters worse, I bought this book at an airport store for about US$30 - ten lattes would have done me a lot better.
Please save your money - this one's not even worthy for paper back.

Rating:
Summary: 39-60-103-109-175
Review: .... This miserable book by Clancy the old-in-the-tooth wins 39 Five-Stars, 60 Four-Stars, 103 Three-Stars, 109 Two-Stars and 175 One-Star.

Enough said.

Rating:
Summary: A medicore showing from a gifted author
Review: Tom Clancy is my favorite living author, and I was able to enjoy this book. However, it simply pales when compared to his other Jack Ryan books.
I was pleased to discover this story was the most contemporary in the plot line, but was not pleased to see my favorite Tom Clancy characters delegated to mere mentions.
To me, this book was little more than introducing us to a younger group of main characters to be used for future Tom Clancy novels. There is little suspense and the plot fails to draw you in.
Jack Ryan Sr is now retired from government service, and the character of Jack Ryan Jr so far seems too much like his father to make him interesting. The Caruso brothers have character, but really needed a more engrossing Clancy-esque plot to make for a good novel.
It makes me long for another John Clark novel.

Rating:
Summary: DON'T BOTHER
Review: Like several of his most recent books,"Teeth of the Tiger" is a great disappointment.There are several fundamental things wrong with it.First,and most important,there is not enough of a story
here for an entire novel.(At most,it might be enough for the pilot
episode of a TV series.)Second,like other recent Clancy novels,it
is SLOW.There is no significant action until about page 240.
He uses more than half the book to develop his characters,but that
leads to the third major problem.His characters are not credible.
I have had occasion to know a number of people who are in roughly
the same line of work as Clancy's heroes. They don't talk like
Clancy's characters.Clancy's characters are caricatures.They are
not real.Even worse,they are not interesting.That is the problem
with the whole book:It is not interesting.Clancy seems to have lost his knack for storytelling.It's a shame.

Rating:
Summary: "Kidneys of the Tiger," Anyone?
Review: Clancy strikes out in this repetitious and poorly paced yarn of a supposed terrorist-drug lord alliance's attack on the US, foiled by the 23 year old son of perennial Clancy hearo Jack Ryan, and his twin cousins.

The action builds nicely to a mid-book terror attack, then degenerates into a travelogue across Europe as the heroic trio dispatches four bad guys, by sticking each...with a poison pen. Along the way, we get to know their preferences in cars, wines, and national cuisine, and hear their endless, page-consuming moralizing about whether they're "doin' the right thing, bro."

Of course, the fact that the son of a former president, traveling under his real name no less, is one of those sent on this "secret" mission, does make the story a tad unbelievable.
But you can absolutely believe this is the setup for a sequence of Tiger books, e.g. "Brain of the Tiger," "Claws of the Tiger, etc.

How about when they get to "Liver of the Tiger," "Kidneys of the Tiger?"

Hey, if you keep buying them out, Tom'll keep phoning them in.

Rating:
Summary: You don't have to be crazy to read this book, but it helps..
Review: Insipid, trite, boring and, oh, yes, completely unbelievable. I started reading 'Red Rabbit' almost a year ago and it was so bad it hasn't been able to hold my interest long enough for me to finish it. When 'Teeth of the Tiger' came out, I thought, (hoped?), it wouldn't be as bad as 'Red Rabbit.' I was wrong, it is worse.

There is no story, no plot and no point to it. Clancy doesn't even 'wow' the reader with technical details. There are no surprises, no cleaver plot twists and no dazzling technology. Clancy's eloquent narratives are absent without leave. One wonders if his agent didn't come to him and say, "Tom, could you churn out something this weekend, so we can go to press on Monday?".

The three new characters are no match for those that they putatively replace - Jack Ryan, John Clark and Ding Chavez. Those characters actually had some depth. Enough depth so, when Clancy bogged down in details, you cared enough about them to keep reading. John Ryan, Jr. and his cousins are boring and their actions are completely predictable and implausible. The highly competent CIA, FBI and military in the other Clancy books are nowhere to be seen. Most shocking is the book's posit that, because of the acts of terrorism committed against us, a stockbrokerage, (can anyone say, "Terrorism Index"?), can now send out assassins to randomly kill perceived enemies of the state. The villains are banal Arabs who have forsaken the austere lifestyle that all 'good' Muslims are supposed to lead for decadence. Even though you despise what they do, it is impossible to care about them. What we are left with can only be called a 'story', because it does have, minimally, conflict and resolution. I read it in two sittings, when it took me weeks to finish his other books.

This book is almost as bad as Clancy's adaptation of 'The Sum of All Fears' to the screen. I advise skipping both and watching re-runs of JAG. It has better writing, is no less unbelievable and you only waste an hour.

Rating:
Summary: Shaking things up in the Ryan-verse....
Review: As every good storyteller can tell you, it's sometimes good to shake things up a bit, particularly in a long-established franchise as Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series.

Since 1984, Clancy's readers have followed John Patrick Ryan's ascent from Annapolis history professor to President of the United States, focusing particularly on Ryan's fast rise within the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. From his stint as CIA liaison officer in London to a short and contentious stint as CIA Deputy Director, Clancy's most famous character saw both the good and the dark side of the "black world" of the intelligence-gathering business.

But in order to keep Ryan believable and keep his fans interested, Clancy has shaken things up in the "Ryan-verse" several times. In 1991's The Sum of All Fears Clancy placed Ryan in a no-win scenario in which part of a terrorist plot does work -- even though the ultimate goal is not achieved -- and ends his career at CIA. He also diverted readers' attentions in Without Remorse and Rainbow Six to John Clark, a major (but secondary) player in most of the Jack Ryan novels. Finally, in a three-novel arc (Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, and The Bear and the Dragon), John Patrick Ryan becomes the nation's Chief Executive.

Now, in The Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy stirs things up again by handing off the franchise to the "next generation" by making John Patrick Ryan, Jr. one of America's newest clandestine agents.

It's the early 21st Century. President Ryan is now retired and working on his memoirs. His wife Cathy is still a surgeon, and their oldest daughter Sally is attending medical school. In the White House, Edward Kealty (a man whose path to power was once seemingly halted by sexual scandal and his resignation from the Vice Presidency) is now occupant of the Oval Office, having been placed there by his predecessor's assassination. In this time of transition, the war on terror goes on, and new departments and agencies have been created to fight it.

One of these secret agencies is "The Campus," run jointly by the military and intelligence communities. Here, under the cover of a legitimate business outfit known as Hendley Associates, analysts pore over data while field operatives carry out dangerous missions against targeted terrorists. One of the new analysts is the young, talented, but untried Jack Ryan, Jr.

His cousins Dominic and Brian Caruso, twins who have been serving their country well, join young Ryan in The Campus. Dominic, the FBI agent, has just finished one of his first and most harrowing cases, while Brian, a Marine captain, has recently completed a tour of duty in Afghanistan. While Ryan possesses his father's sharp intellect and analytical skill, his cousins have the investigative and combat skills necessary for field assignments.

And when a Muslim terrorist group joins forces with a Colombian drug cartel to inflict grievous damage upon their common American enemy, these three young rookies will pit their courage and skills against this new and nefarious confederacy of evil.

Fast paced and crisply written, Clancy's latest novel dares to take chances by changing the familiar Ryan-verse in unexpected ways. The introduction of a new generation of protagonists allows the author to avoid the President-Ryan-faces-another-international-crisis while showing readers the fates of familiar characters from previous novels, even though not all the developments are happy ones. All in all, however, The Teeth of the Tiger is still an entertaining work, despite its brevity (by Clancy standards) and cliffhanger ending.