Fragile Masculinity series, #2. Some decades after the first book, the cold war is over, the USSR is gone, so John Clark needs a new enemy, so step in ... the KGB! Now doing terrorism! Then it gets absolutely batshit when it turns out the evil villains are environmentalists, scientists, and vaccine manufacturers. Seriously, this is a thing that happens. Also Tom Clancy seems very confused about what environmentalism means, so they spend a lot of time talking about how they think lab rats are cute, and exclusively watch the Discovery Channel. It further turns out that Tom Clancy knows quite a lot about military hardware and tactics, but very little about policing, jurisdiction, international law, or how cell towers work, so the procedural stuff is a bit bizarre for most of it.

Particular highlights for me:
Genocidal maniacs chatting (more than once) about how they want to wipe out humanity to save the environment, but these vegans, they take it *too far*.
The guy who gets some software to turn off cell towers, which will work on any cell tower anywhere in the world, regardless of networks, and it apparently comes on a floppy disk. Then it turns out there's two cell towers in Herefordshire, which he literally has to drive between to put the disk into them.
John Clark harranguing literally an IRA commando who literally just tried to murder his unit, that this was wrong because he and his wife are actually Irish-American, and he wouldn't mind if they stuck to British targets.
The FBI analysts who get an email from a girl saying "help, I've been kidnapped, I'm being held in a medical facility and they injected me with something" and compare it with previous emails and decide it can't be her because the grammar is bad, and its probably someone on drugs.

But the *absolute* highlight is the last section, where they've caught an agent for a multinational drug company red-handed with a canister of weaponised ebola virus he was going to use to start an epidemic, they get a full confession, then decide that they'll struggle to arrest the culprits because it's too hard to get a warrant to search their labs. So instead they decide to just shoot everyone involved.

For noe piss!

Rainbow Six has one of the most amazing plots I've ever seen in a book. Tom Clancy bends the seemly irrelevant beginning all the way around to ultimate climax of the story. My mind was truely blown when I got to the end of this absolutely stunning book. Now, Rainbow Six isn't a page turner all the way through, but there are some very suspensful chapters.If you keep with it for about a hundred pages, you won't be able to put down. Clancy is an amazing writer, and with all his military access, he was able to make the book really authentic. All the equipment and training the soldiers do is right on the mark.I It was very enjoyable and hard to put down. Clancy really nailed it this time around.

I would recommend this book all mature young adults, but it is not for people who can't handle graphic violence. The author is very descriptive, and it is a counter-terrorism book. Besides that, Rainbow Six was a wonderful and exciting story that kept me reading until the end.

This book was very good in my opinion. The reason why is because of how descriptive it is and how much action it has at some points. In general it was peaceful to me and it was a good read that I wish I could’ve done sooner.

Ah, I'd forgotten about this one until today when someone told me about seeing a restaurant utilizing outside seating under a canopy equipped with misters. Hey, crowded seating, misters, a global pandemic of a virus that loves humidity and can survive for a long time on hard surfaces...what could go wrong?

Anyway, back years ago, I was bored and there was this big stack of books from my deceased relative just sitting there, waiting to be donated to the library. It was full of books by the likes of Clancy, Grisham, Koontz, etc. Kept me entertained for the better part of a month. This one I remember because of the connection with misters. Must have enjoyed it somewhat if that stuck in my brain for more than a decade.

Three stars might be a bit much praise for this sort of novel, so take that as in comparison to others of its ilk and not compared to Great Literature. Clancy is Clancy. He wrote like he was paid by the word and never met an adjective he didn't try to wear out. Still, he was entertaining.

Rainbow Six is a hold.
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Overall Thoughtsn
As I say with many of my reviews, where do I even start with a book like this?

I grew up with Tom Clancy, and with Rainbow Six specifically. Before I ever knew it was a book or a series, I knew it as a videogame for the Sega Dreamcast. I remember it being SUPER difficult and liking that there was a character named Chavez.

Now, much older, Tom Clancy is a name everyone knows. "Clear and Present Danger" is one of my favorite CIA / spy thrillers, and Jack Ryan is a new series I like. Because of that, I decided to pick up Rainbow 6 and give it a shot because I've heard great things and wanted to experience something that has been a big part of my life for basically as long as I can remember.

Holy shit, I wish I didn't. Fundamentally, each section of Rainbow Six was great. Clancy can definitely write some great action scenes, and it's obvious he knows about weapons and consults on them -- but I'm saying that as someone that doesn't really know the nuances of weapons or the military.
I would even say that his plot and intrigue is good at the surface level, but the more you find out about characters and their motivations, the worse things get.

This book is, quite simply put, incredibly anti-environmentalist, full of homophobia, misogyny, and succumbs to poorly veiled racism. Let me break down each part here. There'll be some spoilers.

Anti-Environmentalist
The main terrorist faction in this novel are people that want to save the environment. I can understand where they're coming from - we're messing up the planet horribly, and this book does a good job of recognizing that we had a problem even way back in 1998 when it was written. But they go ALL OUT about it, and decide THE ONLY WAY to actually save the world is to kill off like 90% of the population with a virus, but they can save them and their friends in "the new world."
So like... not only do we take wanting to save the planet and make it extreme, but we also make the core beliefs of this group (that natural selection is good, and nature is indiscriminate) but then make them... cherry pick who they want to live? It's ridiculous.
With how much money and the amount of resources this terrorist faction uses, they could have just lobbied. Because if history shows anything, it's that politicians are super corrupt.

Homophobia
The book makes it a point to call out how Popov had no problem shooting someone in the back of the head because they were gay. So he's cool killing gay people, but lets just be ok with the fact that the "Good guys" let him live in the end because mass genocide is seemingly too far for him.
Why make the call out that those characters were gay at all, let alone the fact that Popov enjoyed / didn't have an issue killing them? There's literally no point; it isn't pivotal to his character, and you're not supposed to HATE him anyway. So why? Because homophobia sells to the reader-base, is my guess.

Misogyny
Why are there no women in Rainbow, and if there are, they are... secretaries or wives?
You can look anywhere in the world and see women being bad-ass mother fuckers the same as men. If you believe certain reports, having women to infiltrate where men can't is even MORE important in a shadow organization. But lets make them emotional baggage, or "things to want to go home to." Lets also make sure one of the villains is a women, and call out how men treat her.
I just don't get why Clancy seemed to write characters that could have been awesome, but threw them away. Malloy would have been a super easy way to write a woman into the book, as would have Noonan. But Clancy thinks that only "macho men" who "aren't pussies" can do something like the book describes.
Maybe it's a reflection of his time in the armed forces, maybe it's a reflection of 1998, but it's just stupid and made me roll my eyes at the 99 times he points out how macho everyone is.

Veiled Racism
This is something I'm noticing more and more in my books.
Ok, so we got Chavez, who is Hispanic, and mixed nationalities throughout the Rainbow org. But they base in England, and everyone is basically white outside of Chavez and the clear tokens from each country. Clancy even makes Clark call out how the Brits are running the majority of the show. In an organization where every country should be represented, there was a distinct lack of color here.
Plus, with the majority of the Brits, they simply say, "Quite." whenever Clark or Chavez or anyone else gives exposition. What the actual hell? They say more than 1 or 2 words.

The book isn't all bad. It just isn't very good.
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Prosn
1) The action scenes are wonderful
2) The way you see both the Terrorist POV and Rainbow's POV is pretty cool, but overdone
3) I love that characters from CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER are here, and their story continues. I didn't put the pieces together until this read.
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Consn
1) Everything I referenced above; I won't rehash it
2) The book is 2/3rds too long. The first time you get: a) Macho men, b) evil corporation, c) random terrorist cell attack, d) takedown, e) what could we do better? It's pretty cool... but not 4+ times.
3) Clancy repeats himself over and over. How many times did I need to hear about Noonan's feelings on being a tech nerd and wanting to run with the big boys? Or Clark being unable to keep up with the guys doing PT? Stupid.
4) The ending completely undoes everything the book fought for - law and order. The irony was great, but... wow.
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Closing Thoughtsn
I feel like 24-27yrs old would have been the prime spot to read this. I would have been mature enough to read through it, but immature enough to not see the glaring issues here.

Clancy isn't a bad writer. But why was this book this long? Why did anyone who isn't some hard-ass military buff dude seem bad?
There was just so much that made me go:

that it was distracting from the novel.

If you're a hardcore Clancy fan, read it. If you want some cool scenes, maybe read it? But be ready to want to skip 90% of it.

So, I generally love Tom Clancy books but I really struggled throughout this one. It was incredibly repetitive and overly long. The same story could have been told in a much more compelling way in under half the length. Overall, it's a great premise - a multinational counterterrorism force responding to world crises as they occur.

But in practice, page after page is devoted to boring training and planning conversations, and the action - when it occurs - is a repetitive hostage rescue scenario over and over again. The overarching plot - crazy environmentalists seeking to destroy the world's population to save mother nature - is dull and unrealistic. Clancy also devotes a strange amount of time to his protagonists dismissing climate change and mocking tree huggers.

The book opens with our CT leaders flying commercial to England to start the Rainbow program. Suddenly - what a coincidence! - the plane is hijacked by Basque terrorists. It was so absurd a scenario that I thought the reader was about to learn this was a training exercise. Nope....

And as the story continued it got even more and more absurd and repetitive. Clancy presents the U.S. bureaucracy as far more effective than it is. In one critical moment, a Russian spy ditches a fake passport. And within 24 hours it goes from a trash man finding it, to a lost and found, to the FBI, who discovers its a secret Russian spy's passport. Yea....right. In real life it would sit in lost and found for the next 6 months.

Clancy also loves to highlight interagency cooperation. Every time a character hears about a random FBI agent or air force pilot, the character says some version of "I've heard of them - great reputation" or "I've worked with them, smart person." About half way through the book I started counting how many times that was happening - I got to over 12 by the end of the book. It's a bit absurd.

I'd like to think that if Clancy wrote this book in the age of the war on terror, it might have been more focused on interesting CT work around the world. At it stands, however, this 90s-era story fell completely flat for me. As Clancy's characters, apparently without irony, say at three separate points in the book (referencing the environmentalist's terrorist plot) - "This sounds like the plot of a bad movie!" It sure does, Tom Clancy, so why didn't you write a better one?

Long novel, the last 200 pages flew by though!

If you've made it this far into the "Jack Ryan Universe" you won't be disappointed!

Long book, sometimes repetitive, but the action was phenomenal and ending was great

I want Ding Chavez to be my friend

Listened to this as an audiobook with my dad.
If you asked me what happened in this book, I wouldn’t be able to tell you… I was so lost the entire time I stg. Also, it’s so obvious that this book was written by a man in the 90’s simply by the way women are described (I won’t go into it because I don’t actually care enough). But yeah, the ending was pretty funny I suppose?