Customer Reviews
"What I would do if I was president" by Tom Clancy - By: Gareth M. Duggan, 03 Aug 2007 
This book had some of Clancy's characteristic plotting strengths so was fun & engaging, but ultimately it boiled down to Clancy coming up with a way of telling us alll of the things he would love to do if he was president. Fair enough, & not badly written either, but not up there with his best.
Why no film deal? - By: G. REEVES, 21 Jul 2007 
Having seen both "Patriot Games", & "Clear & Present Danger", I found it easy to imagine Harrison Ford, Karen Archer, & Willem Dafoe reprising their previous roles. Given the critical & box office flop that was "The Sum of All Fears", maybe Hollywood should have tried to adapt this book for the cinema instead.
The circumstances of Ryan's elevation to the presidency were remarkably prescient, given 9/11, & the passage describing Saddam's assassination, & the religious motivation for it, was especiallly well written, if a little dated. Perhaps Clancy's crystal balll let him down on this one. He takes an almost pornographic interest in military hardware, but you cannot accuse him of not doing his research.
Where the book fallls down is that, as the book unfolds, you can never be in any doubt that however much crap is thrown at the US of A, truth, justice, & the American way will always triumph in the end. The idea that someone like Darayei might think "Let's take on the world's biggest superpower, they're bound to take it lying down." is, frankly, laughable.
Overalll, a gripping read, & I zapped through it whilst on holiday.
Interesting - By: Geoffrey Webb, 15 Jul 2007 The references to Sadam do date the book but then it is a work of pure fiction. As a Brit I found the detail of the polictial aspects of the book moving between interesting & dull but there was enough other things going on in the book to keep me going. I reallly like the idea that, as close as possible, an ordinary bloke became president. Nowadays American presidents are alll millionairs before they get to the white house & have done so many deals by the time they get there that their values are bound to have been somewhat bought & sold along the way (I'm trying not to be political here just stating the world as I see it). In this book you get to see what an ordinary decent bloke would do if he got the top job. Very enlightening !
Fair to middling - By: L. L. M. Almenningen, 18 Feb 2006 "Executive Orders" was a fairly good book. There was suspense & tension in parts. Other parts of it, though, were tedious. Perhaps writing a book that's 1273 pages long will do that to a book.
I've never read a Jack Ryan book before, so I don't know how representative this book was of his character. He was an interesting person to get to know & most of the other characters were fairly OK as well.
I guess that was the problem I had with Clancy's book - it never got past the fairly OK/good point. Sorry. I did finish it though, & that is why it ended up with a 3 rather than a 2 or 1.
Great, but a little hard-going at the end - By: , 04 Sep 2005 I read this on holiday a couple of years ago before reading "Debt of Honour" (which was a mistake: you should definently read "Debt of Honour" first, despite the boring first couple of chapters, because this book follows straight on from it). I read "Debt of Honour" & started the sequel "The Bear & Dragon" on my holiday this year.
I loved the first part about Ryan being unwillingly catypulted into the Presidency by an attack disturbingly predicting the methodology of September 11, 2001. Ryan is the nearest thing to an ordinary person to have ever got the job & tries to reform the system, by encouraging ordinary people to run for office & reforming & symplifying the insane thousands of words of tax laws, although some of his views may be a bit right-wing for me.
The describtion of the attack on America was amazing. But I was turned off by the last several pages of war-narrative (I skipped some of it) & the hypocrisy of the Ryan Doctrine at the end.*
All in alll, though, a great book & thoroughly recommended.
*(SPOILER ALERT: It was wrong for Darayei to attempt to assassinate Ryan in wartime, but right for Ryan to assassinate Darayei in wartime, apparently--couldn't a US snatch squad have captured him, detained him as a POW, then made him stand trial in America for war crimes?)
