Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7920 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-16
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
For many readers, Jack Ryan embodies the essence of the modern American hero. Morally centred, disciplined, humble yet powerful, Ryan (and his onscreen incarnations in Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford) has made Tom Clancy one of the most popular writers in the world. But while Clancy has constructed the Ryan mythology, he has also quietly established his shadow double, John Clark. Appearing in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger and Without Remorse, Clark has many of Jack Ryan's most appealing traits, but he is also a darker figure embodying the more paranoid sensibilities of the late nineties. As is made clear from the opening pages of Rainbow Six, ex-Navy SEAL Clark and his colleagues believe violent, deadly force to be the best deterrent for terrorism.

Clark (a.k.a. Rainbow Six) has left the CIA to create an England-based organisation code-named "Rainbow". Its mission: deploy an elite squad of American operatives combined with handpicked British, French and German agents to stop terrorism in its tracks. Rainbow's emergence could not be more timely: in quick succession, the force diffuses three attempted terrorist actions. But Clark becomes suspicious when Russian agents suddenly show interest in Rainbow's work.

Rainbow Six appeals on all the levels that Clancy fans could hope for. The Rainbow operatives, from Navy SEALs to German mountain-leader school graduates, are rendered to inspire with their physical and mental prowess. The book is infatuated with the latest gadgets for scrambling, transmitting and decoding secrets. And, in a carefully woven narrative that simultaneously traces the Rainbow team, a former KGB agent named Popov, the Australian Olympic security team and a sinister group of American scientists, Clancy artfully reveals the mystery of "Shiva" at the centre of the novel. How does Clark measure up against Jack Ryan? He may be the perfect hero for a world with hidden villains. --Patrick O'Kelley

Synopsis
Featuring John Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL known from several of Clancy's novels, this is Tom Clancy's new and most extraordinary novel. John Clark is the man who conducts the secret missions President Ryan can have no part of. Whether hunting warlords in Japan or Columbian druglords, Clark is efficient and deadly but even he has ghosts in his past, demons that must be exorcised. And none worse than the peril he must face in Rainbow Six: a group of terrorists the world has never encountered before, a band of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life as we know it. It is Tom Clancy's most shocking story ever - closer to reality than any government would care to admit.

Customer Reviews

This is great, beginning to end!
Dont pay too much attention of most negetive reviews for this book because it is FICIONAL, its great.

The story involved is highly detailed and exciting, leaving you that feeling "I want to finish this chapet, to read the next one".

I recommend this book for your first Tom Clancy, strictly as a warm up to some of his more thrilling, but less action packed, novels.

make the movie already
I chose to read this book after playing the many rainbow six games on the xbox and xbox 360. And I was not disappointed. This book is truly exciting, its hard to put down. The action scenes are terrific and the attention to detail is fantastic. The only gripe I have about this book is that in my opinion, the main villains didnt get the punishment they deserved, considering what they did to the people the kidnapped and what they had instore for the rest of the world, they got off lightly.

In closing, I highly recommend this book. A movie based upon this novel should be made asap.

Should have been an action movie
While Tom Clancy is a passable writer of fight sequences, this bloated book contains relatively few of these - most of it is dedicated to "developing" the characters, an effort that fails spectacularly thanks to poor dialogue. The villains are all insane fanatics, but also massive hypocrites (environmentalists who ride Hum-Vees?), so the reader can feel no sympathy for them; and the actual Rainbow team consists of carbon copies of tough, rugged stereotypical Hollywood heroes. Everyone seems to view vegetarians as insane maniacs, and yet the last decision of John Clark reveals that he is the biggest monster of them all - I would explain, but that would be considered a "spoiler", even though the ending alone spoils the rest of the novel. Only Popov is of any real interest to the audience (indeed, his fate at the end of the novel made me smile) but the rest of this thriller had me wondering why it required 900 pages to tell such a dull narrative. Clancy has some passable ideas here, but - like State of Fear by Michael Crichton - he needs a better understanding of storytelling and character development.