Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Clancy, Tom - Louis Menand (review date 16 September 1991)

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Louis Menand (review date 16 September 1991)

SOURCE: "Very Popular Mechanics," in The New Yorker, September 16. 1991, pp. 91-2, 94-5.

[In the following review, Menand provides analysis of The Sum of All Fears and Clancy's popularity.]

I counted fifty-six references to coffee in Tom Clancy's new thriller, The Sum of All Fears. It's a long book, nearly eight hundred pages; still, that's a lot of coffee. Clancy's people need the caffeine, though, because freedom needs their vigilance. They are the intelligence analysts, fighter pilots, submariners, air-defense monitors, radar and sonar operators, secret-service agents, and other military, paramilitary, and civilian personnel on whose alertness the national security depends.

To describe Clancy's feeling for these people as respect is inadequate. He loves them; and his love includes an attentive sympathy for the special demands that a constant state of readiness, and 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