Dead or Alive: A Jack Ryan Novel

This is my first time reading a book that was really written by Clancy. But I have read other books with his name on the cover all of which were based on his video game franchise Splinter cell. In short I have been a fan since 2005 when I played Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory along with Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six Vegas. I am just one of many readers and Video gamers who will miss Clancy`s style of writing. With Clancy it's simple, you either love what he does or you don't, and if you are fan, then it's been a long time, about ten years since he has been on the Best Seller list, but once again that is where he is headed. Clancy is the master of his genre because he takes the time to learn technical aspects of what he is writing about. This means when you read Clancy you are reading the real thing. Facts are checked, scenarios are discussed with technical aspects, and nothing is left to chance or done offhandedly.When he talks weapons, he goes into the detail that a munitions dealer would deal with. In this novel we see operators using a Knights Armament M110 Sniper System. He tells you it's the best because he has done the homework. It is facts like this that the master storyteller weaves into the tapestry of his books that many readers including myself find fascinating.I am not going to discuss the plot in detail because that's why we read the book. Here's what you need to know. This is a big blot book which is what most of Clancy's books represent. In this case, Jack Ryan is a retired President of the United States. His son Jack Junior is running a secret independent anti-terrorist agency that his father the President started.It is called The Campus, and it has been successful for years going after the bad guys. The current President seems to be weak on terrorism and is more concerned with guaranteeing the legal rights of the bad guys than protecting the country. You are already seeing the subplots develop.Clancy puts us in the thick of it. We as readers are in the game. When Delta Force operators and Rangers go into the caves of Afghanistan we are with them. We breathe the odors; we hear the sounds, and we feel the tension. We find ourselves silencing our own voices because we don't want the good guys to be caught, and that is classic Clancy.In this book there is evil in the world, and in DEAD or ALIVE, an evil man in the world is at lodge. He has wreaked havoc on the Western world. We call him the Emir, and his objective is to deal a devastating terrorist blow to the United States. The book takes you around the world while Ryan Junior, and his father's old hands John Clark and Ding Chavez join Ryan along with Brian and Dominic Caruso with Mary Foley.It's a race for time, and for America. Will the good guys win, and where is the Emir? Is he in a cave 8,000 miles away or is he right here among us? You will have to read the book to find out and oh what an ending.Why I Love Clancy and you will too?Please allow me to give you a feel why Clancy was the absolute best writer in his fiction segment. It is his incessant ability to weave odd important facts into his stories, and to weave reality into the fabric of the plot:* His description of the computer setup at the National Security Agency is without equal.* There are 125,000 cranes in the world and currently Dubai has 30,000 of them currently building and rebuilding the city. Who knows things like this?* Plans do not survive the first contact with the enemy.* Laziness has consequences. If you are a sentry, if you pause, if you hesitate, if you light up a cigarette, you are DEAD.* You don't have to like it; you just have to do it.* The FBI Urban Tactical Training Facility is preeminent in the world. They are the best of the best. See why in the book.CONCLUSION:This is a great read, all 848 pages of it. You start the book and you can't put it down, and in the end isn't that why we read Clancy. We just keep going until we are finished, and when we are finished we are ready for more. That is why he will be missed by so many readers out there. Read it today and see for yourself, and thank you for reading this review.

With Clancy it's simple, you either love what he does or you don't, and if you are fan, then it's been a long time, about ten years since he has been on the Best Seller list, but once again that is where he is headed. Clancy is the master of his genre because he takes the time to learn technical aspects of what he is writing about. This means when you read Clancy you are reading the real thing. Facts are checked, scenarios are discussed with technical aspects, and nothing is left to chance or done offhandedly.When he talks weapons, he goes into the detail that a munitions dealer would deal with. In this novel we see operators using a Knights Armament M110 Sniper System. He tells you it's the best because he has done the homework. It is facts like this that the master storyteller weaves into the tapestry of his books that many readers including myself find fascinating.I am not going to discuss the plot in detail because that's why we read the book. Here's what you need to know. This is a big blot book which is what most of Clancy's books represent. In this case, Jack Ryan is a retired President of the United States. His son Jack Junior is running a secret independent anti-terrorist agency that his father the President started.It is called The Campus, and it has been successful for years going after the bad guys. The current President seems to be weak on terrorism and is more concerned with guaranteeing the legal rights of the bad guys than protecting the country. You are already seeing the subplots develop.Clancy puts us in the thick of it. We as readers are in the game. When Delta Force operators and Rangers go into the caves of Afghanistan we are with them. We breathe the odors; we hear the sounds, and we feel the tension. We find ourselves silencing our own voices because we don't want the good guys to be caught, and that is classic Clancy.In this book there is evil in the world, and in DEAD or ALIVE, an evil man in the world is at lodge. He has wreaked havoc on the Western world. We call him the Emir, and his objective is to deal a devastating terrorist blow to the United States. The book takes you around the world while Ryan Junior, and his father's old hands John Clark and Ding Chavez join Ryan along with Brian and Dominic Caruso with Mary Foley.It's a race for time, and for America. Will the good guys win, and where is the Emir? Is he in a cave 8,000 miles away or is he right here among us? You will have to read the book to find out and oh what an ending.Why I Love Clancy and you will too?Please allow me to give you a feel why Clancy is the absolute best writer in his fiction segment. It is his incessant ability to weave odd important facts into his stories, and to weave reality into the fabric of the plot:* His description of the computer setup at the National Security Agency is without equal.* There are 125,000 cranes in the world and currently Dubai has 30,000 of them currently building and rebuilding the city. Who knows things like this?* Plans do not survive the first contact with the enemy.* Laziness has consequences. If you are a sentry, if you pause, if you hesitate, if you light up a cigarette, you are DEAD.* You don't have to like it; you just have to do it.* The FBI Urban Tactical Training Facility is preeminent in the world. They are the best of the best. See why in the book.CONCLUSION:This is a great read, all 848 pages of it. You start the book and you can't put it down, and in the end isn't that why we read Clancy. We just keep going until we are finished, and when we are finished we are ready for more. That is why 10 years is too long to wait for a Clancy novel. Read it today and see for yourself, and thank you for reading this review.Richard C. Stoyeck

I loved the Jack Ryan original series...I read executive orders 4 times, and some of the scenes in those books are the best action sequences I have ever read. I had really high hopes for this book - old characters, and a great threat to civilization. This book is a real mixed bag however, and I think clearly shows two authors (I suspect one with Mr Clancy occasionally contributing) not talking too much, with different ideas for plot development. I think had they had a strong editor to take 1/3 off the book length, it could have been a good book, but it is too slow to get anywhere, and some pretty big plot threads sometimes seem to go nowhere, like Jack Ryan Snr. You can quite easily read this missing out whole chapters. The opening sequence with the rangers is superb, but the rest of the book slowly drifts off. I don't think he has done enough to justify buying book three of this series. This is a real shame for me.

This is a book some notches below what one could expect from Tom Clancy. Even then, it is a good and entertaining read for the fans of the genre.Strong points are the immersiveness of the narrative and the validity of the world conditions at large (i.e. terrorism, assimetric warfare). The plot is good and deserves four stars by itself. The action sequences are well written.As for the weak points one could start by the political views - which lean on the rightest side of right - the author preaches from time to time. The book comes out as a manifest for torture and executions (yes, the "good guys" do it), the bashing of any form of public healthcare (or "public almost anything"), the discrediting of earth warming, the free carriage of guns etc. All in all, the views of the author will look alien to the average european who reads the book. Still in the weak points, one can also consider some big oversights such as the wrong information about shia and sunni people in Iraq, raw data that forms the basis for one of the subplots of the story. On the subject of oversights one could also consider the poor information the author displays about IT stuff that goes to the point of talking about DVD-ROMs with 60Gb capacity(!!). Another weak point and probably the most important is the fact that the characters are quite unidimensional in their personalities. They are either good, honest and honorable folk or the contrary. That's not how things work in real life. Everyone has flaws and everyone has qualities. The terrorists are all cut from the same evil cardboard and display just a complement of bad traits. They should be much more fleshed out and the reader should be allowed to establish a link with each of them. As they are, they look like some guys with the inteligence of an orange in tactical situations while wearing a blanket of evil wherever they appear in the narrative. As for the "good guys", they are all poster boys of human qualities, from intelligence to intuition, passing by honesty.To sum it up, this book is an improvement over The Teeth of the Tiger but stands a long way from Tom Clancy's masterpieces of the '80s and '90s. Buy it if you like the genre.

At the end of Clancy's first 'Jack Ryan Jr' book 'Teeth of the Tiger' the stage was set for a really exciting new series of stories. I waited with baited breath.... and waited.... and waited. Alas Tom Clancy was busying himself with video games and his various book franchises to which he attached his name. It took until 2010 for this follow up to be published. Except I was horrified to see it wasn't a Tom Clancy novel, it was ghost written. Presumably Clancy had thought up a plot and couldn't be bothered to go through the chore of writing... The result was utter tedium. All of the spirit of his own books was gone... Message to Mr. Clancy - get back to writing your own books, or you will be losing legions of fans

Like all Clancy books, this starts slowly, with a very detailed back story, but it is worth it in the end. A good read, if you can get through the first couple of hundred pages, you will be rewarded with a gripping storyline, which continues the Ryan fun and games, bringing back a lot of the old characters and continuing the development of the "Campus". Fast paced, it is not of the same quality as the classic Ryan books, which could not be put down. Still, if you are a fan of the Ryan series, then it is worth reading.

An excellent read, full of twists and turns. With this book i could even forgive the American English. One small criticism, it could have done with an index at the back to keep up with all the acronyms abounding. I worked in Operations in the RAF for 20 years and i found it difficult at times to keep up with them all.