Clancy, Tom 1947–

views updated

Clancy, Tom 1947–

(Thomas L. Clancy)

PERSONAL: Born 1947, in Baltimore, MD; son of a mail carrier and a credit employee; married Wanda Thomas (an insurance agency manager), August, 1969 (divorced, 1998); married; wife's name Alex; children: (first marriage) Michelle, Christine, Tom, Kathleen. Education: Graduated from Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, 1969. Politics: Conservative. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—P.O. Box 800, Huntingtown, MD 20639-0800. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Putnam Berkley Group, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Writer. Insurance agent in Baltimore, MD, and Hartford, CT, until 1973; O.F. Bowen Agency (insurance company), Owings, MD, agent, beginning 1973, owner, beginning 1980. Military service: U.S. Army Reserve Officers Training Corps.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Hunt for Red October, Naval Institute Press (Annapolis, MD), 1984.

Red Storm Rising (also see below), Putnam (New York, NY), 1986.

Patriot Games (also see below), Putnam (New York, NY), 1987.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin (also see below), Putnam (New York, NY), 1988.

Clear and Present Danger (also see below), Putnam (New York, NY), 1989.

The Sum of All Fears (also see below), Putnam (New York, NY), 1991.

Red Storm Rising; The Cardinal of the Kremlin: Two Complete Novels, Putnam (New York, NY), 1993.

Without Remorse, Putnam (New York, NY), 1994.

Debt of Honor, Putnam (New York, NY), 1994.

Three Complete Novels: Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Putnam (New York, NY), 1994.

Executive Orders, Putnam (New York, NY), 1996.

Rainbow Six, Putnam (New York, NY), 1998.

The Bear and the Dragon, Putnam (New York, NY), 2000.

Red Rabbit, Putnam (New York, NY), 2002.

The Teeth of the Tiger, Putnam (New York, NY), 2003.

Also creator of novel series written by others, including (with Steve Pieczenik) "Op-Center," (with Martin Greenberg) "Power Plays," (with Pieczenik) "Net Force," and (with David Michaels) "Splinter Cell," all published by Berkley.

NONFICTION

Submarine: A Guided Tour inside a Nuclear Warship, Putnam (New York, NY), 1993, revised edition, written with John Gresham, Berkley (New York, NY), 2003.

Armed Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Calvary Regiment, Putnam (New York, NY), 1994.

Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing, Berkley (New York, NY), 1995.

Reality Check: What's Going On out There?, Putnam (New York, NY), 1995.

Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, Berkley (New York, NY), 1996.

Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force, Berkley Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier, Berkley (New York, NY), 1999.

(With Martin Greenberg) SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare, Berkley (New York, NY), 2000.

(With John Gresham) Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces, Berkley (New York, NY), 2001.

(With John Gresham) Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship, Berkely (New York, NY), 2003.

NONFICTION; "COMMANDERS" SERIES

(With General Fred Franks, Jr.) Into the Storm: A Study in Command, Putnam (New York, NY), 1997.

(With General Chuck Horner) Every Man a Tiger, Putnam (New York, NY), 1999.

(With General Carl Stiner and Tony Koltz) Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces, Putnam (New York, NY), 2002.

(With General Tony Zinni and Tom Koltz), Battle Ready, Putnam (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to Fighting Chance: Journeys through Childhood Cancer, Woodholme House (Baltimore, MD), 1998. Also author of foreword to Silent Chase: Submarines of the U.S. Navy, by Steve Kaufman, Thomasson-Grant, 1989, and Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Modern Warfare, by John B. Alexander, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

ADAPTATIONS: The Hunt for Red October was adapted as a film for Paramount, directed by John Mc-Tiernan and starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, 1990; Patriot Games was adapted as a film for Paramount, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Harrison Ford and Anne Archer, 1992; Clear and Present Danger was adapted as a film for Paramount, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Harrison Ford and Willem Dafoe, 1994; The Sum of All Fears was adapted for a film from Paramount starring Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman, 2002, and as a video game by Michael Knight, Prima Games (Roseville, CA), 2002. Several of Clancy's novels have been adapted as audio books.

SIDELIGHTS: Tom Clancy has single-handedly created a new thriller genre; franchised his name into audio, movies, and computer games; and sold over a hundred million copies of his military and espionage thrillers worldwide. One of only a select group of authors whose hardcover releases are launched with multimillion-copy printings, Clancy is, according to Jeff Zaleski in Publishers Weekly, "more than an author. Just as Walt Disney was more than an animator. He is the producer of a distinctive and innovative body of work, a brand name much as Disney is."

Known for his hugely successful, detailed novels about espionage, the U.S. military, and advanced military technology, Clancy was proclaimed "king of the techno-thriller" by Patrick Anderson in the New York Times Magazine. Since the 1984 publication of his first novel, the acclaimed Hunt for Red October, all of his books have become best-sellers. As Rich Cohen wrote in Rolling Stone, "Indeed, Clancy seems to have saturated the national consciousness, creating a new American style, a hybrid of rugged individualism and high technology." Although popular with armed forces personnel as well as with the public, Clancy's work has also received more negative attention from officials who have found his extrapolations from declassified information uncomfortably close to top-secret reality. Reviewers have also criticized his characterizations and too-perfect weaponry. Still, sales in the millions and constant best-seller status attest to Clancy's continued popularity as "novelist laureate of the military-industrial complex," as Ross Thomas described him in the Washington Post Book World.

While Clancy was writing insurance policies for a living, he became a military history buff, specializing in naval history and ultimately becoming something of an expert in military history and weapons technology. Gradually, Clancy put these interests together and began writing a novel in his spare time. "Writing a novel is murderously hard work—worse than I can say," Clancy wrote in a letter to friends in 1983, toward the end of the creation of The Hunt for Red October, when he was still balancing full-time work as an insurance broker, being the father of four children, and attempting to become a novelist.

When Clancy finished his massive first novel, he sent the manuscript off to many publishing houses. After receiving rejections from them, he learned that the Naval Institute Press, which had published only nonfiction for over a century, was going to begin publishing fiction. Clancy sent the book off to them and they bought it for $5,000, subsequently selling off paperback rights to Berkley Books, an imprint of Putnam, for almost $50,000. His first novel also won him the sponsorship of a young agent, Robert Gottlieb, who helped to steer Clancy's career into a mega-star of thriller writers.

The Hunt for Red October, which describes the race between U.S. and Soviet forces to get their hands on a defecting Russian submarine captain and his state-of-the-art vessel, marked a number of firsts. It was the first best-seller for both author and publisher, and it became the first of Clancy's books to be made into a motion picture. Conceived before the author had ever set foot on a submarine, it is "a tremendously enjoyable and gripping novel of naval derring-do," according to Washington Post Book World critic Reid Beddow. The book contains descriptions of high-tech military hardware so advanced that former Navy Secretary John Lehman, quoted in Time, joked that he "would have had [Clancy] court-martialed: the book revealed much that had been classified about antisubmarine warfare. Of course, nobody for a moment suspected him of getting access to classified information." The details were actually based on unclassified books and naval documents, Clancy's interviews with submariners, and his own educated guesses, the author asserts. Admitting that "neither characterization nor dialogue are strong weapons in Clancy's literary arsenal," Richard Setlowe in the Los Angeles Times Book Review nonetheless expressed an opinion shared by other reviewers: "At his best, Clancy has a terrific talent for taking the arcana of U.S. and Soviet submarine warfare, the subtleties of sonar and the techno-babble of nuclear power plants and transforming them into taut drama."

In Clancy's second novel, Red Storm Rising, a U.S.-Soviet conflict escalates toward world war. Crippled by a Muslim terrorist attack on a major Siberian oil refinery, the Soviet Union plots to defeat the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so that it can dominate oil-rich Arab nations unhindered. The novel covers military action on land and in the air as well as on submarines; its complicated narrative prompted Chicago Tribune Book World reviewer Douglas Balz to note that Clancy's "skill with the plot … is his real strength." Balz and other critics faulted Clancy's characterization, although in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Lekachman deemed the problem irrelevant to the book's merits as a "rattling good yarn" with "lots of action" and the "comforting certainty that our side will win." John Keegan, writing in the Washington Post Book World, called Red Storm Rising "a brilliant military fantasy—and far too close to reality for comfort."

Patriot Games tells how former Marine officer Jack Ryan, a key figure in The Hunt for Red October, accidentally places himself between a particularly fanatical branch of the Irish Republican Army and the British royal family. Several reviewers criticized it for lack of credibility, lags in the action, simplistic moral lines and, again, poor characterization, conceding nevertheless that it should appeal to fans of the earlier books. Anderson voiced another perspective: "Patriot Games is a powerful piece of popular fiction; its plot, if implausible, is irresistible, and its emotions are universal." Pointing out Clancy's authentic detail, powerful suspense, and relevance to current history, James Idema suggested in a Chicago Tribune Books review that "most readers [will] find the story preposterous yet thoroughly enjoyable."

Ryan appears again in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, which returns to the theme of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this episode, regarded by critics such as Lekachman as "by far the best of the Jack Ryan series" to date, Clancy focuses on the controversial laser-satellite "strategic defense systems" also known as "Star Wars." According to Lekachman: "The adventure … is of high quality. And while [Clancy's] prose is no better than workmanlike … the unmasking of the title's secret agent, the Cardinal, is as sophisticated an exercise in the craft of espionage as I have yet to encounter." Remarked Fortune contributor Andrew Ferguson, Clancy "aims not only to entertain but also to let his readers in on the 'inside story,' meanwhile discussing with relish the strategic and technological issues of war and peace." Concluded Ferguson, "It is refreshing to find a member of the literati who is willing to deal with [defense policy] in a manner more sophisticated than signing the latest disarmament petition in the New York Times."

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Clancy had to search for new enemies to engine his novels. In Clear and Present Danger, Ryan, in league with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), joins the fight against the powerful South American organizations that supply illegal drugs to the U.S. market. After the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is murdered on a trip to Colombia, the fight becomes a covert war, with foot soldiers and fighter planes unleashed on targets suspected of drug involvement. Reviewing the novel in the Wall Street Journal, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams wrote, "What helps to make Clear and Present Danger such compelling reading is a fairly sophisticated view of Latin politics combined with Mr. Clancy's patented, tautly shaped scenes, fleshed out with colorful technical data and tough talk." Abrams commended Clancy's awareness of the ethical dilemmas that complicate such covert military operations. Some reviewers echoed earlier criticisms of Clancy's characterizations, focus on technology, and prose style but, as Evan Thomas noted in Newsweek, "It doesn't really matter if his characters are two dimensional and his machines are too perfect. He whirls them through a half dozen converging subplots until they collide in a satisfyingly slam-bang finale." Thomas called the book "Clancy's best thriller since his first," and "a surprisingly successful cautionary tale."

Patrick O'Brian commented in the Washington Post Book World that The Sum of All Fears "is about four times the length of the usual novel and deals with at least four times the usual number of themes." In the novel, Jack Ryan is Deputy Director of the CIA, a Middle East peacemaker, and out of favor with the White House. Not all of the factions accept the peace he negotiates. Palestinian terrorists and other radicals obtain a nuclear weapon that they explode at the Super Bowl hoping to cause an all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union. "The scenes of deployment and nuclear hell at the Super Bowl are truly chilling," wrote Les Standford in his review of the novel in the Chicago Tribune Books. Standford added, "Ryan's subsequent attempts to calm a crackpot president and avert a global nuclear war are harrowing. It's just a shame we couldn't get to the plot a bit sooner." Morton Kondracke remarked in the New York Times Book Review that among Clancy's talents is his ability to "keep several sub-plots and sub-sub-plots in the air at the same time. In this book he has outdone himself."

In Without Remorse former Navy SEAL John Kelly, who appeared in several previous Clancy novels, becomes something of a vigilante, tracking down and killing the drug-smuggling pimps who are after the prostitute he has befriended following the deaths of his wife and unborn child. In addition, the U.S. government dis-patches him on a special mission to Vietnam to liberate POWs. In the Washington Post Book World, Marie Arana-Ward declared, "What Clancy manages to deliver to us armchair warriors … is a different kind of virtuosity: a meticulous chronicle of military hardware, a confident stride through corridors of power, an honest-to-God global war game, and a vertiginous plot that dutifully tracks dozens of seemingly disparate strands to a pyrotechnic finish." Gene Lyons, writing in Entertainment Weekly, commented, "given his turgid style and psychological absurdities, Clancy still knows how to tell a tale, and millions of would-be warriors who make up his loyal readership will no doubt find themselves thrilled to their toes."

In Debt of Honor a Japanese financier who blames the United States for his parents' deaths during World War II seeks revenge in the economic markets and through military means. Ryan, now White House national security adviser, becomes vice president as a result of the way he handles the crisis, and ascends to the presidency when a Japanese airman attacks the U.S. capitol with a Boeing 747, killing the president. Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor John Calvin Batchelor remarked, "Clancy's passion is overwhelming. His sense of cliffhanging is state of the art. The close of this book is a five-run homer." Executive Orders picks up where Debt of Honor concludes, with Ryan facing the burden of running a government, most of whose power holders are now dead. He also is being assailed by domestic and foreign political and military challenges. Of the author's weighty ninth novel, Gina Bellafante observed in Time that Executive Orders "is another doozy of laborious plot, bombastic jingoism and tedious detail."

Clancy's 1998 best-seller, Rainbow Six, a sequel to Executive Orders, achieved record-setting first-week sales. The work again features John Kelly as its central character, while Ryan sits in the White House. Kelly heads the Rainbow Six group, a counter-terrorist unit working under the auspices of NATO. The London-based Operation Rainbow rescues hostages and possesses weaponry that can vaporize terrorists. Kelly works with his son-in-law, Domingo "Ding" Chavez, from Clear and Present Danger and Without Remorse, and the novel's action begins when they foil an airplane hijacking. From London they head to Switzerland, where a bank is under siege by terrorists. The plot includes a planned bio-apocalypse engineered by a group of radical environmentalists related to a biotech billionaire named John Brightling. Booklist reviewer Roland Green counted "four counterterrorist actions as grippingly depicted as anything Clancy has ever done—set pieces guaranteed to keep thriller readers flipping pages" late at night. A contributor to Publishers Weekly also praised the action sequences as "immensely suspenseful, breathtaking combos of expertly detailed combat and primal emotion," though the reviewer faulted Clancy's characterization of Kelly, calling him a less intriguing hero than Ryan. Writing in People, J.D. Reed liked the "jolting denouement" and commended the author's "elaborate descriptions of the latest techno-gadgetry and his bolt-action mayhem."

Considered a popular lay expert on military technology issues, Clancy also writes nonfiction works as well as novels, among them Into the Storm: A Study in Command, written with Army general Fred Franks, Jr., and Every Man a Tiger, written with fighter pilot Chuck Horner, the top air commander for Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Every Man a Tiger as "less about the Gulf War than about the making of a modern fighter general and the remaking of a modern air force." Clancy also wrote the foreword to Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Modern Warfare with John B. Alexander, a military veteran who formerly worked with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The book details future weapons, including a sticky foam that immobilizes the enemy, and beams that induce vomiting.

Clancy has also penned seven books in the "Guided Tours" series, each focusing on a key institution in the U.S. military, from submarines to airborne. In Special Forces, written with John Gresham, he looks at these "snake eaters," as they are known in the military, examining aspects from training to specific operations they have been involved in. A Publishers Weekly contributor felt that despite the "jargon" Clancy occasionally slips into, the author "remains a consummate storyteller, and this book is no exception to his oeuvre." With his Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces, written with Carl Stiner and Tony Koltz, Clancy probes deeper into this elite fighting force. "Clancy has turned his prodigious output to documenting the new face of war making," noted Mel D. Lane in a Library Journal review, "and for students of the military, this book is welcome."

In The Bear and the Dragon Clancy gives readers a new Jack Ryan thriller. Like his other works, this eleventh Clancy blockbuster was scheduled for a first printing of two million copies, a publishing industry high mark which only John Grisham thrillers and J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books achieve. The thousand-page novel depicts an ominous political situation: a potential showdown between China and Russia. China is in se-vere economic trouble and needs resources in Eastern Siberia to save it. As U.S. president Ryan works overtime to find a solution, antiterrorist expert Clark helps out, as does a well-connected Chinese woman who is recruited to spy. Entertainment Weekly writer Bruce Fretts found some anti-Asian prejudice in the prose, but stated that "Clancy deserves credit for developing a number of compelling African-American characters," including his vice president. Fretts also remarked that "The Bear and the Dragon starts draggin' when Clancy shoehorns in an antiabortion subplot, yet it eventually builds to an excitingly cinematic climax as Ryan toils to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war." A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented on the numerous subplots in the lengthy novel. "Each thread carries a handbook's worth of intoxicating, expertly researched—seemingly inside—information, about advanced weapons of war and espionage, about how various governments work," the critic stated, adding that while Clancy's latest offering seemed a veritable "sea of words," it is an enjoyable read nonetheless, "because that sea glitters with undeniable authority."

In Red Rabbit, Clancy takes Ryan on his tenth adventure, yet this is not the Ryan of the presidency or the head of the CIA. Here Clancy follows the timeline back to 1981, shortly after Ryan saved the life of Prince Charles from IRA assassins in Patriot Games. Knighted by the queen and relocated by the CIA to London to work with British intelligence services, Ryan now becomes involved in the attempt to prevent the assassination of Pope John Paul II. Based on an actual 1981 attempt on the pope's life, probably mounted by the KGB, Clancy's story finds Ryan discovering that top Soviet officials—including then KGB head Yuri Andropov—are plotting to kill the pontiff. Ryan must sift through the information to confirm such a plot, and then battle to foil it. His attempts are aided by a KGB major who does not agree with the assassination plot and wants to stop it by defecting. Ryan, a CIA analyst new to the job, must get this defector and his family out of Moscow and do everything in his power to save the pope while also maintaining the stability between the United States and the Soviet Union.

"There is much to admire in Red Rabbit," noted Patrick Anderson in the Washington Post. Anderson praised Clancy's ability to "move skillfully among a large cast of characters" as well as his insider information about "how spy agencies operate." Anderson also felt that Clancy's writing "has improved since the clunky prose and robotic dialogue" of his first novels. However, the same critic also found "maddening" problems in the "repetitious" mention of Clancy's political stance and favorite phrases, and the "gratuitous profanity" his protagonist uses. Anderson concluded though, that on the whole, the book was in some ways "an impressive achievement" and among the author's "better efforts." Less laudatory was a review by Todd Seavey in People, which found the novel lacking in tension. "The only suspense," Seavey wrote, "lies in wondering whether something will happen before the book runs out of pages." A contributor for Publishers Weekly also complained that the "suspense is minimal" in this "lumbering" novel, while Bruce Fretts, writing in Entertainment Weekly, felt it is a mistake for Clancy to write in the past and thereby deny himself "his trademark obsession with gadgets." For Fretts this "low-tech, action starved" book "lacks any semblance of suspense."

Unprecedented knowledge of military technology, plots of rousing adventure and taut suspense, and themes that address current international concerns have combined to make Clancy "one of the most popular authors in the country," in the estimation of Washington Post Book World writer David Streitfeld. He is so well liked by military personnel, in particular, that he has been invited to military bases and given tours of ships. Evan Thomas in Newsweek reported, "Bluntly put, the Navy realized that Clancy was good for business." Cohen drew the similarities between Clancy and his popular character Jack Ryan. He wrote, "In a way, Tom Clancy has become Jack Ryan: He lectures at the FBI; he dines at the White House; he has been asked on numerous occasions to run for public office; he gives his thoughts on world affairs; he hosts fund-raisers for his friend Oliver North; he attends meetings at the CIA; and like his friends there, he seems almost comically obsessed with leaks and the flow of information." Some critics even credit the author with helping to banish the negative opinion of the military that arose after the United States' controversial involvement in the Vietnam War.

How wide-ranging Clancy's influence really is may be debatable, but his fan base cannot be questioned. In September, 2003, his novel The Teeth of the Tiger roared onto the best- seller list's number-one spot. This time, Clancy writes about Ryan's son, also named Jack, and two of Jack's cousins, the twins Dominic and Brian Caruso, a former FBI agent and U.S. marine, respectively. After describing the trio's recruitment and training by Hendley Associates, a vigilante organization out to fight terrorists and others that threaten America, Clancy then introduces an Islamic terrorist plot involving Colombian drug dealers and a plan to kill people in four shopping malls in America's heartland. Writing in the Washington Times, Joseph C. Goulden noted that the story of the terrorists' plot and their coming to America "is told in the exquisite attention to tradecraft detail that makes Mr. Clancy … well, terrifyingly good reading, for his scenarios are not far removed reality." Entertainment Weekly contributor Marc Bernar-din found the book contained too much of Clancy's "ham-fistedly repetitive passages" and added that "even his vaunted plotting is getting creaky." A People reviewer enjoyed the novel far more, writing that "Clancy's look at counterterrorism is educational as well as visceral."

In 2004 Clancy published Battle Ready, as part of his nonfiction "Commanders" series. The book, written with retired General Tony Zinni and ghostwriter Tony Koltz, was met with mixed reviews. Joseph C. Goulden, writing for World and I, wrote that the book is "perhaps the most alarming critique of the U.S. military I've read in years." "Although he identifies himself as a 'soldier/diplomat' because of his post-military work, Zinni does not hesitate to slice, with a very sharp tongue, what he considers to be nitwit ideas," Goulden added. Philip Caputo, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, found fault with the style of the book. He noted, "the writer and the warrior [trade] places like a tag team…. The result is neither biography nor autobiography, but a mishmash." Caputo concluded that the book is "curiously lifeless, dulled by abstract discussions of military doctorine and crippled by a lavish use of bewildering bureaucratic abbreviations and acronyms." However, a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that although Battle Ready is "often too detailed for nonen-thusiasts," it's General Zinni's "closing statement … that will sell the book to nonbuff civilians, summing up his service and the ways in which he feels his generation's legacy is in jeopardy."

Jason Cowley, a writer for the New Statesman, stated that Americans are addicted to catastrophic narratives, and that Clancy gives them what they want. "Through reading Clancy, Americans have lived vicariously with a sense of an ending, simultaneously embracing what they most fear and perhaps most desire, the ruin of cities, the collapse of nations, the vanquishing of alien peoples," mused Cowley. The author's fiction proved disturbingly prescient in light of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City. In The Sum of All Fears Clancy had created a scenario involving militant Arabs who use commercial airliners as weapons of terror. Cowley maintained: "It is no exaggeration to describe Clancy as the novelist who comes closest to understanding and animating the modern American psyche: paranoid, deluded, isolated and aggressively confrontational."

As for criticism of his work, Clancy admitted in a Washington Post article: "I'm not that good a writer. I do a good action scene. I handle technology well. I like to think that I do a fair—fairer—job of representing the kind of people we have in the Navy…. portraying them the way they really are. Beyond that, I'll try to … improve what needs improving." The secrets of his success as an entertainer, concluded Anderson, are "a genius for big, compelling plots, a passion for research, a natural narrative gift, a solid prose style, a hyperactive … imagination and a blissfully uncomplicated view of human nature and international affairs."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bestsellers 89, Issue 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Bestsellers 90, Issue 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 45, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Greenberg, Martin H., editor, The Tom Clancy Companion, Berkley Books (New York, NY), 1992, revised edition, Berkley Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Newsmakers 1998, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Legion, December, 1991, p. 16.

Barron's, September 17, 2001, "Eerie Parallels: Clancy Novel Anticipated Kamikaze Attack with a Commercial Airliner," p. 28.

Book, March-April, 2002, Chris Barsanti, review of Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces, p. 72.

Booklist, August, 1998, Roland Green, review of Rainbow Six, p. 1920; February 1, 1999, Roland Green, review of Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier, p. 946; September 15, 2001, Jeanette Larson, review of The Bear and the Dragon, p. 241; January 1, 2004, Candace Smith, review of The Teeth of the Tiger, p. 891.

Chicago Tribune Book World, September 7, 1986, Douglas Balz, review of Red Storm Rising.

Detroit News, January 20, 1985.

Economist, March 17, 1990, p. 87.

Entertainment Weekly, August 6, 1993, pp. 50-51; September 1, 2000, Bruce Fretts, "Spy vs. Spy," p. 73; August 23, 2002, Bruce Fretts, "Just Say Nyet," p. 136; September 5, 2003, Marc Bernardin, review of The Teeth of the Tiger, p. 79.

Foreign Affairs, May, 1999, Eliot A. Cohen, review of Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Modern Warfare, p. 130.

Fortune, July 18, 1988, Andrew Ferguson, review of The Cardinal of the Kremlin; August 26, 1991.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), September 2, 1989.

In Style, February 1, 2000, Jim Jerome, "The Tom of Her Life," p. 256.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2001, review of Shadow Warriors, pp. 1731-1732.

Kliatt, November, 1995, p. 6.

Library Journal, May 1, 1999, Ray Vignovich, review of Rainbow Six, p. 129; March 15, 2002, Mel D. Lane, review of Shadow Warriors, p. 95.

Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1989.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 9, 1984, Richard Setlowe, review of The Hunt for Red October; July 26, 1987; August 21, 1994, John Calvin Batchelor, review of Debt of Honor, pp. 1, 9.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1991, p. 73.

National Review, April 29, 1988.

New American, July 1, 2002, William Norman Grigg, "Sum Doesn't Add Up," pp. 28-30.

New Republic, June 24, 2002, Stanley Kauffmann, "Truth and Inconsequences," p. 26.

New Statesman, September 24, 2001, Jason Cowley, "He Is the Most Popular Novelist on Earth, Whose Images of Catastrophe Animate the Modern American Psyche," p. 28.

Newsweek, August 17, 1987; August 8, 1988; August 21, 1989, Evan Thomas, review of Clear and Present Danger,

New Yorker, September 16, 1991, p. 91.

New York Times, July 17, 1986; August 12, 1986; February 25, 1990; March 1, 1990; August 18, 2002, Thomas Vinciguerra, "Word for Word: The Clancy Effect," p. 7.

New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1986, Robert Lekachman, review of Red Storm Rising; August 2, 1987; July 31, 1988; August 13, 1989; July 28, 1991, Morton Kondracke, review of The Sum of All Fears, pp. 9-10; August 22, 1993, pp. 13-14; October 2, 1994, pp. 28-29; July 11, 2004, Philip Caputo, "The Writer and the Warrior," p. 7.

New York Times Magazine, May 1, 1988.

People, September 8, 1986; September 12, 1988; September 5, 1994, p. 34; August 17, 1998, J. D. Reed, review of Rainbow Six, p. 37; September 9, 2002, Todd Seavey, review of Red Rabbit, p. 43; September 8, 2003, review of The Teeth of the Tiger, p. 47.

Publishers Weekly, August 8, 1986; July 1, 1988; July 25, 1994, pp. 34-35; August 5, 1996, p. 433; July 13, 1998, Jeff Zaleski, "The Hunt for Tom Clancy," p. 43, John Zinsser, "Clear and Present Sounds," p. 51, and Daisy Maryles, "The Cardinal of the Lists," p. 52; July 27, 1998, review of Rainbow Six, p. 55; August 17, 1998, Daisy Maryles, "Clancy's Latest Victory," p. 20; January 4, 1999, review of Carrier; April 19, 1999, review of Every Man a Tiger, p. 50; August 21, 2000, review of The Bear and the Dragon, p. 51; September 4, 2000, Daisy Maryles, "Clancy Does It Again," p. 24; January 1, 2001, review of Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces, p. 79; January 21, 2002, review of Shadow Warriors, p. 78; July 29, 2002, review of Red Rabbit, p. 51; August 11, 2003, review of The Teeth of the Tiger, p. 257; May 10, 2004, review of Battle Ready, p. 49.

Reason, May, 1999, Mike Godwin, "Truthless.com," p. 50.

Rolling Stone, December 1, 1994, p. 114.

Saturday Evening Post, September-October, 1991, p. 16.

School Library Journal, June, 1995, p. 143.

Time, March 4, 1985; August 11, 1986; August 24, 1987; July 25, 1988; August 21, 1989; March 5, 1990; March 12, 1990; September 2, 1996, Gina Bellafante, review of Executive Orders, p. 61; July 29, 2002, Lev Grossman, "Ten Questions for Tom Clancy," p. 8.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 5, 1987, James Idema, review of Patriot Games; August 11, 1991, Les Standford, review of The Sum of All Fears, p. 7.

Wall Street Journal, October 22, 1984; August 16, 1989, Elliott Abrams, review of Clear and Present Danger.

Washington Post, January 29, 1985; March 17, 1989; March 2, 1990; August 8, 1993, pp. 1, 14; August 18, 2002, Patrick Anderson, review of Red Rabbit, p. T6.

Washington Post Book World, October 21, 1984, Reid Beddow, review of The Hunt for Red October; July 27, 1986, John Keegan, review of Red Storm Rising; May 14, 1989; August 13, 1989; July 28, 1991, Patrick O'Brian, review of The Sum of All Fears, pp. 1-2.

Washington Times, November 9, 2003, Joseph C. Goulden, review of The Teeth of the Tiger, p. B06.

Weekly Tribune Plus, September 16, 1994, p. 8.

West Coast Review of Books, November-December, 1984.

World and I, November, 2000, Robert R. Selle, "Technothriller Creator and Freedom Advocate," p. 50; September, 2004, Joseph C. Goulden, "An Outspoken Retired General Critiques Iraq War Planning," p. I9.

Writer's Digest, October, 1987.