Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Clancy, Tom - John Calvin Batchelor (review date 21 August 1994)

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John Calvin Batchelor (review date 21 August 1994)

SOURCE: "Tom Clancy's Damn-the-Literary-Torpedoes Style Dances at the Edge of the Daily News," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 21, 1994, pp. 1, 9.

[In the following review, Batchelor offers praise for Debt of Honor.]

Tom Clancy is America's most wish-fulfilling policy-maker, and in his eighth spectacular and scary novel, Debt of Honor, he plunges America into a foreign policy that is at once unthinkable and very thrilling—a campaign that the present State and Defense departments can only wish they had the talent to fight.

Real war with Japan. Real Japanese sneak attack against America's Pacific fleet, real paralyzing nuclear gamesmanship with rebuilt Soviet missiles, real state terrorism, real American territory taken by foreign troops, real dead Americans in the thousands, and all this in the immediate future.

The moment when the President learns of the...

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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