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Rainbow Six is a chilling, thrilling action novel.... Oct 5, 2003 (47 of 55 found this helpful)
Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's 10th novel and ninth in the Jack Ryan/John Clark series, once more focuses on the ex-CIA paramilitary field officer known in the Agency as Mr. Clark. This time, the focus once again turns to the challenges of fighting global terrorists and the menace from extremists determined not only to reshape society, but the entire planet's environment.
Clark is close to retiring as a paramilitary officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations when Agency executive directors Ed and Mary Pat Foley, with the tacit approval of the recently elected President John Patrick Ryan, ask him to run an elite team of antiterrorist Special Ops fighters from several NATO countries. Their mission: to act as an international 911 team in hostage and other terror-related situations deemed too high-risk for local law-enforcement agencies. Based in England, this so-called Rainbow Team will be deployed mainly in Europe, but with support from U.S. and other allied nations, can operate anywhere in the world. Clark, who was an enlisted member of a SEAL team in Vietnam, is given a rank equivalent to a full colonel and the call sign Rainbow Six. (In military parlance, the designator "six" after a unit's call sign is assigned to a commanding officer.)
Rainbow Six opens with a tense incident high above the Atlantic as a small group of Basque terrorists attempts to hijack the plane carrying Clark, his wife, his protege and new son-in-law Domingo "Ding" Chavez, and Alistair Stanley, his British second in command, to London. Using their wits and finely honed skills, the three Rainbow members overwhelm the hijackers and save the crew and their fellow passengers.
With this introduction to the job, Clark then turns his attention to training the various members of the several Rainbow teams, not knowing that the airliner incident was simply one of many terrorist incidents being bankrolled by a mysterious and wealthy individual with a darker, more terrifying agenda. With the assistance of a former KGB officer and inspired by one of the most horrible aspects of the Iranian plot against the U.S. (as chronicled in Executive Orders), a group of environmental extremists is plotting to reverse centuries of man-made damage to the Earth's biosphere by committing the most horrible act of mass murder in history.
Clancy's novel paints a troubling picture of what happens when a noble idea (such as promoting global conservation) is twisted and perverted by charismatic and cold-blooded individuals, and its action-oriented plot inspired an ongoing series of computer games.
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An excellent read, just one or two flaws Mar 10, 2000 (40 of 51 found this helpful)
Let's face it. Shakespeares' pants, a load of plays copied straight from older storylines. But anyway, Tom Clancy is probably the best author in the world for this sort of book. However, he has fallen once again on his two main flaws to receive a perfect 5/5. These flaws are simple ones: 1. Americans are the best, superheros who are better than everyone, even the SAS, which I doubt. 2. Storylines leading to nowhere - very frustrating However, he still accumulates all the key elements for a brilliant read. In some of his books, particularly Executive Orders, I found myself sat reading for days before I read that a tiny US task force obliterated a steamroller style Iran/Iraq army defending its own ground. However, in Rainbow Six, the action comes at appropriate times so that my interest did not attenuate as I went along. Also, the action is simply fantastic, with suspense, careful planning and perfect takedowns that you would expect from such men in real life. The weapons used are awesome in power, particularly the sniper's rifles, and I was fascinated to read how such men trained. It's been made into an excellent computer game. Might we be getting a film just as good? I think we should.
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this rainbow's just missing a few colors... Jan 18, 2001 (7 of 7 found this helpful)
Besides the length, I like to think of this as a sort of action movie in a book...it's worth reading because of a series of sequences that make it fun, but if you're looking for good literature, "Rainbow" has no hidden pot of gold. Clancy gives us almost no sense of his characters, presenting them as all-powerful, invincible human beings, just like a modern-day Bond thriller.
Of course, you could argue, who cares? That's what I said. This thick mother of a book is replete with 007-styled shoot-em-up sequences, where the pages turn a mile a minute.
So how is this book 800+ pages? Come on. It's Clancy. He gives us his usual military specifics and detailed descriptions of obsolete or unusual devices, used as filler space between his truly well-written action scenes.
Another thing. This book has no plot. What plot there is, however, nicely serves as a device to bring on Clancy's thrilling terrorist take-downs. I think he should simply exclude all "plot," simply write a series of random exciting action scenes, because this book's attempt at plot is surprisingly pitiful. Makes you feel sorry for poor Tom.
Now, I've heard folks tease him for "getting paid by the word" but...seriously, no one really cares, this book still made the top spot on The NY Times, because it's Clancy, and everyone loves him. This book might be too verbose; so what? At the very least just skim over the boring stuff, or simply skip it entirely. The rest is too good to miss.
By the way, "Rainbow Six" the game is even better...
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Tom Clancy being Tom Clancy Apr 29, 2006 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
Tom Clancy's literary reverence for things military is overtly evident through his books from Hunt for Red October onwards. In Rainbow Six, he indulges in small unit tactics for a whole tome. In many ways typical Tom Clancy, the book is instructive at a layman level about anti-terrorist tactics as practiced by special forces units. I have little doubt that the usual level of research went into this book that Mr Clancy usually carries out. I admit to being an unabashed fan.
So why not five stars?
Well, to be honest, nothing ever goes wrong for these guys. The books continuously alludes to the virtual certainty of problems with operations, but then nothing really does. I kept waiting for the problem and the subsequent analysis, but it never happened. I realized that, among the other obvious things that I like about Clancy, the recognition of the failings that people have and the way these play out on a broad stage are much of what I enjoy about his books. This one doesn't really have that.
Good Clancy, but not the best Clancy
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I'm a tree-hugger, and I loved it. SPOILERS AHEAD! Aug 26, 2003 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
I didn't realize for years that Mr. Clancy had written other books in the Ryan universe besides _The Hunt for Red October,_ and I kicked myself when I found out what I had been missing: lots of big fat good books with equal portions brain and heart. This one took some getting into, though, because I am a granola treehugging eagles-belong-downtown envirofeminist myself. (Belong downtown? In my little Alaskan town, they crap on the cars. Everybody in the U.S. should have the privilege of wiping bald eagle crap off of their own automobile.) But on rereading, I got a chill down my spine.
Any deeply held belief system can be coopted by the taint in the human soul and turned into a Cause, as in Anything For The. Clancy's genius shows in the way he created a believable charismatic human monster in the historic tradition, but gave him a Cause for the 21st century. It made me reexamine my dismissal of the wackaloons of the environmental movement. All they need is a demagogue.
The lesser monsters who cluster around John Brightling have their finely drawn individual freakishness as well. They remind me of Hitler's supporting cast, and I suspect that that was the author's model. You have the man who scarcely blinks at human death but flinches at the deaths of small animals; the self-indulgent brute who murders rather than restrain his appetite; the enthusiastic planners who are so in love with the big picture that they find it easy to ignore its horrible scaffolding; the dreamers who really believe that their personal obsessions justify the bloody overthrow of civilization. I entertained myself on a hot afternoon by imagining life in the Kansas facility in a plotline where the Project succeeded. Then I shuddered and went out into the sunlight.
The musings of various Project members are some of Clancy's finest bits of irony to date. I liked the media room for the use of the grandchildren of the Anointed--as if fresh videotapes would spring up next to the strawberries. And the idea that the most important thing to consider, when trying to feed several thousand people on local resources, would be recipes. And the ark built by radical environmentalists that requires petroleum to keep out the deadly Kansas winter. And so on.
But Clancy is scrupulously fair. There is the brown smudge. There was the Exxon Valdez disaster. (The way a denizen of the Wonderland Beyond the Beltway drastically underestimates its scale and severity even while using it as an excuse for murder is another fine bit of irony.) There is the inescapable legacy of nuclear waste. There is the way mine tailings put arsenic in drinking water. It is human nature to use hard facts in the service of convenient lies. Clancy uses them instead to tell a whacking good story that leaves you thinking about the contradictions of humanity. He does this a lot. Go buy. Go read.