[In the following review, Shacochis offers praise for The Sum of All Fears.]

OK, all of you despondent Desert Storm junkies, cheer up—the adventure continues (for a whopping 800 pages; none of this Wham, Bam, Thank You, Saddam stuff). The Sum of All Fears is the perfect panacea for anyone experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the Gulf War, unwilling to trust the White House to co-produce the sequel.

Whoever spends the bucks on Tom Clancy's sixth novel should be able to figure out how decent people become drug addicts, since Clancy is to storytelling what a voracious crack habit is to cocaine, firing narcotic blasts of 100% pure plot right down your pipes. And yet, if you're hankering for a little Escapist Lit from the guy, forget it; his MO is to animate the newspapers, enriching the radioactive wastes of international headlines with the intent of making himself the unequaled superpower of the best-selling universe.

To start with, our noblest aspirations, our prettiest dreams for the latest of our splendid little wars have come true. Is the would a safer place now? You bet. And it would be even safer, muses our hero, Jack Ryan, deputy director of Central Intelligence, "if we could just do something about the Israeli side … It would be nice, he thought, to set the whole area to rest."

Nice, yeah. Count me in. Jack has a terrific idea, which he floats before the President's chief of staff and national security adviser. What if we turn Jerusalem into an International City of God, an ecumenical DMZ, administered by representatives of the three most trouble-making religions with dibs on the place, and persuade the Vatican to help us broker the deal, get the Swiss guard to police those holy mean streets, permanently station an armored U.S. Cavalry regiment on Israeli soil, give back the occupied territories, and that's that, and Earth can take a well-deserved vacation from the routine of 9-to-5 carnage?

Everybody agrees: nice. Yet, it's the same old pipe dream until the Arabs Finally wise up, do the Martin Luther King thing, the Gandhi thing, organize a nonviolent sit-in, even singing "We shall overcome," to protest the plan of 10 fundamentalist rabbis to rebuild Solomon's Temple. While the CNN cameras roll, the Israeli police force fires rubber bullets into the demonstrators, who react, even as they are dying, with another chorus of the civil-rights anthem. A cross-wired Israeli captain goes berserk, murdering a young Palestinian leader in cold blood, close up and personal, for all the home viewers to see.

Oops, Israel's claim to moral superiority flies right out the geopolitical window. "A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy," pontificates the national security adviser. "We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator."

Not exactly words resonating with truth, but Jack Ryan's Vatican initiative—called Project PILGRIMAGE—jumps to the top of the list on Washington's dance card. The Russians come on board, natch. The Saudis, the Swiss. President Bob Fowler, a Quayle-like clone destined to become the Great Peacemaker (and later, in the clutch, the Crown Prince of Inadequacy), does some plain-talking: "We let Israel know that they either play ball or face the consequences, and that we're not kidding this time." Israel acquiesces. The deal is cut; the applause is euphoric.

But hold on, there's a 50-kiloton fly in the ointment. Not everybody, it seems, appreciates the New World Order; for instance, at least four terrorists nostalgic for the Cold War harbor a death wish for the Zionist Promised Land. Their agenda's fairly strict, and when they come into possession of a thermonuclear device—well, you knew it was going to happen some day—they detonate the sucker. In the ensuing confusion, Washington and Moscow prepare to nuke the daylights out of each other.

If Tom Clancy could only write as astutely as he narrates, if he found people as compelling as he finds facts and mechanisms and systems—weapons; cybernetics; intelligence-gathering systems—then perhaps Clancy would be our Tolstoy, rather than a Michener of the spook parade, the Stephen King of national-security affairs.

His characters are Front Page People, never penetrating their stereotypes, never shedding their prepackaged traits and images, and they can offer a reader no more emotional involvement than you might invest in a good Super Bowl learn that's not your own. A lot of men are required to prove their manhood here, which I suppose explains why Clancy foreshadows his plot development with all the subtlety of a female dog in heat. And speaking of females, the author apparently doesn't like them much, especially the small-breasted variety.

Still, the scope is awesome, few writers have the muscle for it, and who wants to read Virgil at the beach anyway, when you can dig into Clancy's stash and blow your head right off with blockbusting excitement. What I'm saying is, whatever your gender, The Sum of All Fears will appeal to the most boy part of you.

Hey, Clancy: thumbs up, power weenie. You kicked ass.