Customer Reviews

The Teeth Of The Tiger - Large Print Edition

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(89)
3 star:		(150)
2 star:		(187)
1 star:		(349)

 

 

This is by far the worst Tom Clancy book I have read. I thoght Red Rabbitt was bad, but this is even much worse. When Clancy first started writing novels, plots were well developed as were characters. Much like Sid Meier's computer game of the same name, Hunt for Red October, was superb. So much so, that the U.S. Naval Institute (a group of former naval officers)for the first time in their history published Clancy's book as a unknown author. Most of the rest of the Jack Ryan series were similarly taut. Now that Mr. Clancy has developed into a full blown businessman (he owns part of the Baltimore Orioles, for example), he seems to have forgotten his readers, the folks that got him his fortune. Teeth of the Tiger is actually boring in spots and comes across as well as a first draft of a freshman english essay. I forced myself to wade through most of the book only to be set up for a sequel at the end. If Clancy thinks that his name recognition alone will sell his books, he may start wishing that he was still selling insurance, the job that he had prior to his first book.

How disappointing. This book desperately needed an editor to throw it back at Clancy for a rewrite. It was, in many ways, stupid. Loaded with utterly unbelievable events. If the world of international espionage really functions like this, we are all in big trouble. I don't remember any previous Clancy books being this childish. Foolish dialogue, especially between the Caruso twins. I never got to like them because they talked like such idiots from start to finish. And those nicknames were utterly annoying. Jack Jr. is not much better. In fact, there isn't an intelligent person in this whole book, which tells me that it's actually the author who lacks intelligence. One glaring example: The rookie spook, Jack Jr., talks openly in public to the twins about top secret info he's learned on the job, naming names of someone who will be their first "target." I immediately assume that Jack will soon be in big trouble for his "loose lips." Nope. Clancy never deals with it at all, even though the twins tell their superior that Jack filled them in. (Oh, you told them about this super-classified info without authorization? No problem, kid.) What nonsense. And there were many other similar flaws. Like them ID'ing their target in Vienna by happening to remember seeing him in Munich. "We're not certain he's the guy, but we're pretty sure so let's just go ahead and kill him." Just stupid. And get this: The 20-something Caruso boys, when comparing Ferraris to women, refer to Grace Kelly and Maureen O'Hara. Grace Kelly and Maureen O'Hara ?! Is Clancy out of his mind? They were both dead before either of these kids were born. Maybe Clancy himself fantasizes about those gals, but it's ludicrous to think his young characters would ever say such a thing. Obviously his editor: A) is afraid to question anything Clancy writes, or B) never reads any of it, figuring if the name Clancy is on the cover, it will SELL, and that's all that matters.
Someone at the Penguin Group should lose their job for letting this dog get into print. A major let-down.

In case it isn't obvious from the preceding 482 reviews, this book is a disaster, and not even worth reading if someone gives it to you for free. When Clancy first burst onto the scene with Red October, he was an unbelievable breath of fresh air, excellent writing, believable plots and characters, and nail-biting suspense. The fact that he managed to continue his run through several more books is a testament to his skill as a writer.

Unfortunately, after getting Jack into the White House, Clancy began to lose steam, with Red Rabbit being an extraordinary disappointment to his fans. With Teeth of the Tiger, however, our favorite novelist has really hit rock bottom (well, actually the real rock bottom was his simply excreble "collaborations" on OpForce where he sold his name, but I'm talking here about his own writing.)

There is a saying that when a television show "jumps the shark" it has turned the corner and is headed for oblivion, and that may well be the case here. Tiger is a simply miserable book, with zero plotting, completely implausible scenarios, ridiculous characters who are both boring and poorly written, no suspense...in fact, there isn't a single decent thing one could write about this book!

Despite all of the above (as if they weren't enough) what saddened me most of all was the way Clancy wrote the characters of the twin brothers. Come on! How many successful attorneys-turned-FBI-agents go around speaking like troglodytes who couldn't get a high-school diploma?? These days, it seems that whenever Clancy puts dialogue in the mouths of "young people", all he can come up with stuff like "hey, Bro, whatcha doing?" or things of that ilk. And Jack comes across as obnoxious, impatient and not-very-bright...certainly not someone whom you would cheer on.

Ah well...Tom's series was great when it lasted, and we all owe him a big vote of thanks for single-handedly reinvigorating the thriller genre. But, sad to say, I think I've read my last Clancy original for a while. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I've read pretty much all of Clancy's books, and I usually find them entertaining--this one was anything but. I actually was only able to finish reading this book on my second try--the first time I just gave up.

Mostly I found this one pretty tedious and uninventive, Clancy will actually repeat the same dialog, descriptions, and excerpts several times throughout the book, almost like he wanted to get a phrase or euphamism into the book and then forgot that he already put it in there.

The dialog was torture to me, I found it really hard to read because the way that Clancy has people talking to each other is just not the way people talk. Two of the main characters in the book were brothers and they would always adress each other by their nicknames, first names or by 'bro' even when they were alone.

I.e. they could be in a car alone, and basically one guy will say "What do you think, Aldo?" and the guy will go "I don't know, Enzo." Really, who talks like that to their brother? I know it is minor, but I found it more and more irritating over the course of the book.

Other things that bothered me is that Clancy took a lot of artistic license with how cyptography works (in that it is easy to crack, but only if you're the US Government), and the character's ability to eaily snoop in on unsuspecting terrorist's mail. This sort of eavesdropping is just not really possible, and it was used as a crutch throughout the entire story.

The other thing that really bugged me is that one of the other people in the book was Jack Ryan, Jr. In Clancy's universe Jack Ryan, Jr. is the son of a popular two-term president--yet we're expected to beleive he can participate in covert overseas espinage without being sighted, ID'd or recognized? Imagine Chealsea Clinton running around in Europe without being recognized at least ocassionally--it is too far-fetched to be believable.

Lastly I was disguested with and had a hard time identifing or feeling good will towards the protaganists--basically they run a black psuedo-government agency that consider themselves above the law. Picture a Nazi-style thug assassin squad that funds itself by using insider trading, and 'borrows' employees from tax-payer funded government agencies. I guess I just take the bill of rights too seriously to be entertained by a book that basically says 'to hell with it'. I know it is supposed to be fiction, but to me it is akin to reading a book were a multi-murder was the protaginist--it is hard to feel sympathy or even understand the 'good guy' when the good guy is the sort of scum you'd wish didn't exist.

This first chapter in what promises to be a series of "Campus" sequels was enough to put me to sleep several nights in a row. It was so bad I began paying more attention to the oh so tiring and repititious hip slang and cool dialogue. I took to counting the number of times a character "lit up his computer" and prayed for a simple "turned on" or even "fired up" but that was not to be. The welcome end to the book left me wondering if someone had torn the last half of the pages out before I realized the publisher simply printed up Part I and hopes to issue Part II to the dwindling fans of "Hasbeen" Clancy.

Having struggled through all 12 books of the apocalypse, I have gotten used to reading half a story, and Clancy did not dissappoint me. I can only hope that he bothers to write the 2nd half, because as bad as the first half was I still have to know how the real story ends.
Nobody I read so far complained about this part of the plot -- Terrorists want to attack by getting guns and shooting people at random. These terrorists can't think of any way of pulling this off short of making a deal with drug lords. Obviously they never heard of the DC and Ohio Snipers. It would be trivial even now to get 8 people into the country, supply them with weapons, and have them go on a shooting spree. It wouldn't have to be coordinated. Heck, we had the guys who robbed the bank in body armor and it took 45 minutes for the cops to take them down. How hard would it be for 8 terrorists to get some good body armor. The entire scenario was absurd in its overwrought sense of daring and difficulty.

Other than that, I kept waiting for the "other shoe to drop", assuming Clancy was going to make a morality play on how you can't win by doing evil. But he never got there, and I can only hope he'll get there in the 2nd part of the book but watching his recent political interviews I think he might have changed for the worse in more ways than one.

The Teeth of the Tiger is, sadly, the worst Tom Clancy novel I've ever read. In fact, it's so bad that I doubt that Clancy even wrote it. More likely, he sketched out the plot on a piece of paper (and not a very big piece of paper at that) and outsourced the writing to some unnamed subcontractor.

The book starts off well - in fact, that's what led me to buy it at my local bookstore. His unique fiction-salted-with-fact style really hooks a reader, and when I found myself sitting on the floor of the bookstore reading the first twenty pages, I realized I wanted to buy the thing and take it home.

But the deeper I got into the book, the less compelling it became. The first half leads up to a terrorist event, and in typical Clancy style the build-up is gradual and inexorable. But then we get to the event itself, and here the plot hinges on a coincidence so unbelievable that, for me, it kicked me right out of the novel and into "what was he thinking?" mode. I won't go into details, but the odds of a certain two guys being in the same place as a certain other four guys is, literally, a million to one. Good novels don't rely on those stunts.

The second half of the book is a disaster. The two guys, who single-handedly (okay, double-handedly) dispatched the four terrorists in a major attack on American soil, suddenly go off into another adventure overseas. What about the crushing media attention that these guys would have to endure? What about debriefing, interviews with the press, congressional inquests, and all the rest? Nothing. Not a peep.

And so the last couple of hundred pages are a mishmash of cold blooded killing (by our guys!), mind-numbing descriptions of every meal and buddy-buddy conversation they have, at least five nearly identical descriptions of a particular method of dispatching bad guys, and political commentary that goes beyond Clancy's usual manly-man conservatism and veers into nasty Rush Limbaugh territory. There are no surprises, no complications to interfere with the dreary sequence of executions, no plot twists, no interesting insights, just plodding page after page until it's finally done.

I had to finish the book, partly because Clancy is such a great writer that I kept hoping he'd redeem himself. No such look. The book ends with a fizzle, and a teaser to get you hungry for the sequel. Sorry, Tom, I won't be buying it.

Okay, I've got it.... Chelsea Clinton and her Rodham cousins can be sent to dispatch Osama bin Laden with a poisoned pen. While deep undercover (unless the National Enquirer decides to tag along), they fly first class, drive a porsche, book an overnight stay in the cave next to Osama, have some drinks each night, discuss their mission openly, but still mange to maintain their anonymity and kill their target. But, when done they can say the immortal words of Tom Clancy, "Been there, done that and got the t-shirt." This book was ridiculous.

After reading almost all of Tom Clancy's books to find one that was only 431 pages was almost suspect. The book has a great premise with a new secret organization "The Campus" that is an independent business that operates without politics or government slowing down the process. Jack Ryan and a former senator, Gerald Headley, are the brains behind, "The Campus", an investment firm that also keeps tabs on terrorists and Headley runs the firm. It is Jack's son that plays a main role, fresh out of college, Jack Ryan, Jr. applies for a job with, "The Campus", and ends up playing a major role in uncovering a terrorist cell. In the meantime two of Jack's cousins (Marine and FBI by profession) are recruited by, "The Campus", to become the hit men to go after key terrorists. The method developed in the plot to find and kill these people is what makes Clancy a great writer. The plot gets intense as these young men have to decide whether they can kill people without government support or sanction. As I read the last 20 pages I could not believe that the book could end. Although there is a conclusion as to the planned action, Clancy must have been planning to write additional parts. Therefore this 431 page book should be called Part 1 of ... If you like Clancy do not hesitate to read this book, if you want closure at the end of the book then wait until the next one comes out and read them both at that time.

Hi All,
Well I have just finished the Teeth of the Tiger and have to say I am very disappointed with this effort from Clancy. I thought red rabbit was very poor, it seemed like Mr Clancy had drafted a skeleton of a story line and someone else finished it for him. This book is worse !!!!

yes it starts off ok, but then gets pretty boring and just a little stupid (and some of Clancy's research is poor) towards the end.
The story line is very linear and unimaginative, as for the main character being Jack Ryan's son, I mean come on could he think of something better !!.
Being that Jack Ryan senior was president, so his face would be well know, just imagine a covert intelligent agency hiring his son, whose face would be very recognisable, it is just too far fetched. To top this off Jack (Jr) is joined by his twin cousins.

None of this in my opinion contribute to a good story and I was left bitter disappointed with this novel.

I will be very wary of the next Clancy novel and probably get it from the library next time, as it was not worth the money paid.

I am sorry Mr Clancy, you need to start another story line, or at least change the current one, an do some better research as this book is just @$@#!!