The Bear and The Dragon

Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon, copyrighted in 2000, is one of my bargain books from a library sale several years ago. The shear size of the book, 1028 pages, kept me from reading it until this month. Now I know why I put off reading this bear of a book.

The first approximately 600 pages was all about setting up three story lines involving intelligence agencies, political figures and the military in Washington, DC, Moscow,and Beijing. Clancy's recurring characters continue to deal with the intelligence world, government investigations and negotiations and a climax that involves the threat of nuclear war so it is classic Clancy. I would have liked this one much better if it had been condensed to about 400 pages and the profanity had been left out. The conflict revolves around China going after Russia's Siberian gold and oil resources. In this book, the Americans are aligned with the Russians (the good guys) against the Chinese (the bad guys). However, it took so long to get near the conflict I lost interest several times and it took weeks to finish reading it.

If you enjoy books that move quickly, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you like lengthy books that delve into the characters and the details within many subplots, you'll like this one. As for me, I'm just glad I made it to page 1028 so I can check it off my reading list.