Dead or Alive

Locations
Call Number: BOCD Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact discs.
Performed by Lou Diamond Phillips.
For years, Jack Ryan, Jr. and his colleagues at the Campus have waged an unofficial and highly effective campaign against the terrorists who threaten Western civilization. The most dangerous of these is the Emir. This sadistic killer has masterminded the most vicious attacks on the West and has eluded capture by the world's law enforcement agencies. Now the Campus is on his trail.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Not quality Clancy submitted by CasualTim on May 2, 2012, 2:01pm What a shame to see Clancy's decades of hard work building a realistic world be so easily destroyed by shoddy maintenance. I generally avoid authors the minute they get into "Big Name Author, with oh yeah, this other author" or (also in the case of Clancy) "Big Name Author's franchise, oh yeah actually written by this other author,"* a rule that would have served me quite well in this case. But, I saw that Lou Diamond Phillips was performing it and I thought that might be worth a slight decline in quality/consistency. No such luck. Not only are we bombarded with grossly indulgent fundamentalist ranting, but Phillips' voice is, unfortunately, recorded in such a way that it scratches quite harshly if you're listening through headphones. Perhaps the intention was to provide realistic sound effects of the tiniest nanohelicopters buzzing in your ears. But I found it unpleasant.

For the record, characters in the Clancy novels I've read have mostly leaned a little right (at least the ones you most want to be like), and quite often rolled their eyes at those with opposing beliefs, but they did so in a realistic way. Such behavior was, in fact, part of their character, and there were good reasons for that to be the case. In Dead or Alive, the book pretty much devolves into the yelling of propaganda by the time you get to disc 2. I think I'll go back to the old stuff, and go back to the old rule. If the author doesn't even have the decency to ghost his ghost writer, s/he's probably trying to share the blame for something.



*for even more ridiculousness, see such items as "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon by Grant Blackwood as David Michaels"