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A review by rc90041
Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy
5.0
A thoroughly satisfying throwback that is once again relevant, as it is about, in part, a conventional ground war in Central Europe where both sides are attempting to avoid escalation to nuclear exchanges.
This is a peak-Cold-War book about WWIII. Yes, as in other Clancy books, the characters are subsidiary to the lovingly-detailed, highly-technical descriptions of military equipment in the air, sea, and on the ground. There are long, tense passages of surface ships and helicopters playing cat-and-mouse with submarines. Thousands of unnamed people die in various military conflicts. The pages fly by as Clancy moves expertly from various battles in the air, at sea, and in Europe. The close of the book comes faster than you expect--even at 724 pages (in this edition).
Sometimes lost in hang-ups about "good" literature is the truth that sometimes some of the world's most popular books are popular for a reason. Clancy is generally deemed low-brow, Fox News Dad fare. And that's certainly not wrong, in terms of the general audience. But Clancy didn't become so popular simply because of a loyal, politically-like-minded audience. Like Stephen King, Clancy had a special skill: He's able to grab a reader's attention and hold it. The ability to create and sustain real tension is a special skill, no less valuable or important than the ability of any given graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop to describe a quietly crumbling marriage in a college town in Connecticut.
Clancy is also able to effectively describe complicated scenarios and battlefields in a comprehensible way, so that potentially abstruse or obscure military strategy becomes clear to the reader. His ability to translate relatively insidery lingo and details is not too different than John Le Carre's, though they're obviously very different authors.
The sympathetic take on the POV of many of the Russian characters may surprise those who come in expecting a strictly black-and-white, good-versus-evil Cold War tale. It is that, sure, in many ways, but the book also works hard to explain the motivations of the Soviets, the war from their perspective, etc.
This is the best and most thoughtfully-visualized depiction of a conventional-war WWIII that I've come across, and it's my opinion that almost anyone would profit from giving it a read.
This is a peak-Cold-War book about WWIII. Yes, as in other Clancy books, the characters are subsidiary to the lovingly-detailed, highly-technical descriptions of military equipment in the air, sea, and on the ground. There are long, tense passages of surface ships and helicopters playing cat-and-mouse with submarines. Thousands of unnamed people die in various military conflicts. The pages fly by as Clancy moves expertly from various battles in the air, at sea, and in Europe. The close of the book comes faster than you expect--even at 724 pages (in this edition).
Sometimes lost in hang-ups about "good" literature is the truth that sometimes some of the world's most popular books are popular for a reason. Clancy is generally deemed low-brow, Fox News Dad fare. And that's certainly not wrong, in terms of the general audience. But Clancy didn't become so popular simply because of a loyal, politically-like-minded audience. Like Stephen King, Clancy had a special skill: He's able to grab a reader's attention and hold it. The ability to create and sustain real tension is a special skill, no less valuable or important than the ability of any given graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop to describe a quietly crumbling marriage in a college town in Connecticut.
Clancy is also able to effectively describe complicated scenarios and battlefields in a comprehensible way, so that potentially abstruse or obscure military strategy becomes clear to the reader. His ability to translate relatively insidery lingo and details is not too different than John Le Carre's, though they're obviously very different authors.
The sympathetic take on the POV of many of the Russian characters may surprise those who come in expecting a strictly black-and-white, good-versus-evil Cold War tale. It is that, sure, in many ways, but the book also works hard to explain the motivations of the Soviets, the war from their perspective, etc.
This is the best and most thoughtfully-visualized depiction of a conventional-war WWIII that I've come across, and it's my opinion that almost anyone would profit from giving it a read.