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Summary and Reviews of The Bear and The Dragon by Tom Clancy

The Bear and The Dragon by Tom Clancy

The Bear and The Dragon

by Tom Clancy
  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Readers' Rating (39):
  • First Published:
  • Aug 1, 2000, 752 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2001, 752 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

President Jack Ryan faces a world crisis unlike any he has ever known, in Tom Clancy's extraordinary new novel.

Time and again, Tom Clancy's novels have been praised not only for their big-scale drama and propulsive narrative drive but for their cutting-edge prescience in predicting future events.

In The Bear and the Dragon, the future is very near at hand indeed.

Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier: domestic pitfalls await him at every turn; there's a revolution in Liberia; the Asian economy is going down the tubes; and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR--the former KGB--with a rocket-propelled grenade. Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the potential assassins. Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, or disaffected former KGB? Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here?

Ryan is right. For even while he dispatches his most trusted eyes and ears, including black ops specialist John Clark, to find out the truth of the matter, forces in China are moving ahead with a plan of truly audacious proportions. If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same. If they fail...the consequences will be unspeakable.

Blending the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his hallmarks with intricate plotting, razor-sharp suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters, this is Clancy at his best--and there is none better.

PROLOGUE
The White Mercedes

Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-Capitalism hadn't changed matters much -- well, maybe things were now a little worse. Moscow, a city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that nearly anyone could have a car, and the center lane down the wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the Politburo and used by Central Committee men who considered it a personal right of way, like Czarist princes in their troika sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other private car. In the case of Sergey Nikolay'ch Golovko, the car was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There weren't many of them in Moscow, and truly his was an extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him...but didn't. Maybe there were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank did have its privileges, and he was chairman of...

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Reviews

Media Reviews

The Dallas Morning News
When the door blows open and the shooting starts, nobody does it better than Tom Clancy.

Publishers Weekly
Each thread carries a handbook's worth of intoxicating, expertly researchedDseemingly insideDinformation, about advanced weapons of war and espionage, about how various governments work, complemented always with ponderings about the tensions between individual honor and the demands of state. Add to that the excitement for Clancy fans of this being the first novel to feature not just Jack Ryan but also, in significant subordinate roles, Jack Clark and Ding Chavez of Rainbow Six and other tales, and you've got a juggernaut that's going to hit #1 its first week out and stay there for a good while.

Reader Reviews

matt

great story
Punisher

This book is very descriptive and very informing on war an politics. I liked it.
SpringerD

Just another example of the outstanding work turned out by Clancy. Can't wait for the next one!
clancy - tom clancy

it was brill reading i loved it. fantastic - tim quincy ur the man !!!!

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Read-Alikes

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