Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Clancy, Tom - Christopher Hitchens (review date 14 November 1996)

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Christopher Hitchens (review date 14 November 1996)

SOURCE: "Something for the Boys," in New York Review of Books, November 14, 1996, pp. 34-6.

[In the following review, Hitchens provides critical analysis of Debt of Honor and Marine.]

The dedication page of this Behemoth carries a lapidary, capitalized inscription, "To Ronald Wilson Reagan, Fortieth President of the United States: The Man Who Won The War." And this is only fair. In 1984, the Naval Institute Press paid Tom Clancy an advance of $5,000 for The Hunt for Red October. It was the first fiction that the Naval Institute had knowingly or admittedly published. There matters might have rested, except that someone handed a copy to the Fortieth President, who (then at the zenith of his great parabola) gave it an unoriginal but unequivocal blurb. "The perfect yarn," he said, and the Baltimore insurance agent was on his way to blockbuster authorship. Putnam this past...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Walter Isaacson (review date 11 August 1986)
   2. Anthony Hyde (review date 26 July 1987)
   3. Ross Thomas (review date 2 August 1987)
   4. Robert Lekachman (review date 31 July 1988)
   5. Ross Thomas (review date 13 August 1989)
   6. David Wise (review date 13 August 1989)
   7. Elliott Abrams (review date 16 August 1989)
   8. Morton Kondracke (review date 28 July 1991)
   9. Bob Shacochis (review date 4 August 1991)
   10. Louis Menand (review date 16 September 1991)
   11. William F. Ryan (essay date Winter 1993)
   12. G. Gordon Liddy (review date 22 August 1993)
   13. Walter L. Hixson (essay date Fall 1993)
   14. John Calvin Batchelor (review date 21 August 1994)
   15. John Lehman (review date 2 September 1994)
   16. Christopher Buckley (review date 2 October 1994)
   17. Michael R. Beschloss (review date 18 August 1996)
   18. Paul Dean (review date 25 August 1996)
   19. Christopher Hitchens (review date 14 November 1996)
   20. Helen S. Garson (essay date 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Tom Clancy