Red Rabbit

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Summary: Red Rabbit
Review: This book is slow to start and generally verbose. It is very straight ahead with nothing from left field to give the plot a few twists.

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Summary: What's happened to Tom Clancy?
Review: I read Hunt for Red October in two days...but it took me nearly two MONTHS to drag myself through Red Rabbit. It takes hundreds of pages to lead up to an outcome that is obvious from page 50. Because everything has to play out a certain way to match historical fact, there's no suspense whatsoever. And Clancy has turned Jack Ryan and his wife into flawless superpeople who are already the best in the world at what they do (spy/analyst and surgeon, respectively) in their early 30s.

I'd thought "The Bear and The Dragon" was bad, but it's a masterpiece compared to "Red Rabbit".

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Summary: Are you sure this isn't Clancy's first book??
Review: I think Clancy has ran out of books to write and he's just fulfilling his contract with his publisher for another book and so many words each year. The writing is so clumsy and boring it would fail any freshman English course. There is no action, nothing really interesting happens and once interesting characters have had a lobotomy. Clancy and his publisher should be ashamed of this one!!

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Summary: Red Rabbit
Review: This book could have been written in 50 pages. It is the worst Tom Clancy book I have read!

Rating:
Summary: Red Rabbit
Review: I consider myself a Tom Clancy fan and have read all of his books to date including, "Red Rabbit". this was clearly one of the slowest, most boring books that I have ever read. The characters spend hour after hour discussing things that have little to do with the plot.

The hisotircal accuracy of the novel is laughable. Not quite as laughable as the "Bear and the Dragon" where the historical facts were so wrong as to be rediculous. Here they just show an insulting lack of research. If Mr. Clancy is going to charge so much for a book, he could at least spend some of the money to have his historical facts checked out. He has Apple computers in use that were not available at the time of the book. He makes several references to Starbucks stock which was not available at the time.

The historical problems are only more evident because there is little in the entire book to keep your interest. At lest they give you something to think about while wading through the useless drivel.

As far as the suspense of the book. There is none what so ever. A communications officer in the KGB suddenly and inexplicably decides to defect. It makes you wonder why none of the other things the KGB had done previously had bothered him. He is spirited out of the Soviet Union in an infantile uninteresting way with no difficulty at all.

I feel terrible that this will be my last Tom Clancy book. So long Tom, I will miss reading your books.

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Summary: Tom Clancy? Not !!!
Review: The person who wrote "Red Storm Rising" and "Hunt for Red October" could not have written this book. The dialog is stilted and endless, the story is utterly boring, the characters (except maybe the rabbit himself) are shallow and just go through the motions, and NOTHING goes awry. Everything just happens, from the first contact with the rabbit to his arrival in the U.S. I'm thankful I got my copy at a used book store for ten bucks (and I get five back when I turn it in). If this was Tom Clancy, he's contracted the "Jean Auel" disease. (Read "The Shelters of Stone" if you dare, and you'll know what I mean.)

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Summary: BORING BORING BORING
Review: I am also, like most of you, a big Tom Clancy fan. I just finished Red Rabbit an hour ago and I was so peeved about it that I could not wait to go to Amazon.com and write this review. Unfortunately for all of us, this book is just plain boring. There is no suspense, no action, no nothing. I do not read Tom Clancy books to get a history lesson, so I don't care about whether or not the plot to assassinate the Pope was originated by the KGB. Even as a pseudo-historical fiction book, it lacks spice. Clancy has failed to capture any excitement in this book. Every time you think something is about to happen that would increase the action a little (say, something actually going wrong in the CIA's plan that would cause a little bit of adrenaline to flow), oops, all goes right according to plan without a shot fired or even a raised voice. I guess the history lesson learned is that all you needed to succeed with your spycraft in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s was a pair of red Reeboks. Clancy has used about 600 of the pages to establish Jack Ryan's character as a young early 30-something CIA analyst and another 50 pages to establish his wife, super-doctor eye-cutter Cathy as the world's best opthamologist (presumably, also in her early 30s - what, there are no 40 or 50 or 60 year old doctors in the entire world who are more experienced??!!!!!). Who Cares?!?!?! But I digress. And so has Clancy. The book jacket says "This is Clancy at his best - and there is none better." PLEASE! What a joke. I really cannot stand the direction Tom Clancy has gone with his last few books. The last book that I actually would bother to read again is Executive Orders. I suggest we read our Amazon reviews carefully next time and vote with our wallets.

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Summary: Still a fun listen
Review: There are problems with "Red Rabbit", as with all Clancy's writing. But that's like pointing out flaws in Sophia Loren's looks; the imperfections don't matter because the overall effect is still magic. Clancy has a talent for writing page-turners that few can match, and despite the negative reviews others have given, "Rabbit" is no exception. It is, however, different from other Clancy books in a couple of aspects. Where he usually sets up several sub-plots and skillfully converges them by the end, in "Rabbit" he instead focuses on essentially one thread: the plan of a Russian communications officer to defect because his conscience disturbs him when his government hatches a KGB plan to assassinate the Pope. Another difference is that this book is shorter than usual, clocking in at "only" 600 or so pages, and Clancy doesn't waste any time explaining from whence this Russian captain's sudden sympathy for Catholic clergy might have come. A childhood friend, perhaps, or a grandmother who read to him from a carefully hidden family Bible? Naw. He just suddenly decides it isn't right because "this priest is an innocent man". That should not work, we as readers should not believe it. It's one of the flaws I referred to earlier. And yet I was engrossed in the story of this Russian officer and his family and worried about them as if they were real until the very last chapter. It's magic, that's all you can say.

Jack Ryan, Clancy's hero, spends most of his time complaining: about food, about airplanes, about the missions to which he's assigned, usually in rough language that seems, given that he's Catholic and his primary concern for most of the novel is to save his Pope, vaguely ironic. As usual, though, Ryan comes through in the end and justifies our attachment to him. Speaking of, you might ask, how does Clancy make a story to which we already know the ending - that is, if you were paying any attention at all to the news in the 80s - exciting? Without giving anything away let's just say Clancy, as always, has some surprises up his sleeve.

Dennis Boutsikaris' reading is masterful, handling more than a dozen characters with differing nationalities, accents and genders with such skill you often forget that only a single person is reading. His talent supplements Clancy's writing, helping to define the characters. For example, reading some of Clancy's other books I sometimes had a hard time keeping straight Judge Moore and Bob Ritter, two essential characters in the Clancy universe. Boutsikaris' voice characterizations enabled me to see them clearly: Judge Moore is the southern gentleman, Ritter is the know-it-all pipsqueak you'd like to punch.

Recommended.

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Summary: Poor showing
Review: Most of Mr. Clancy's loyal readers probably recall the events of the Spring 1981. Yet Mr. Clancy fills 'Red Rabbit' with distracting anachronisms. Some examples include the following:

On two occasions, the British are grateful for the U.S. help in the Falkland Islands war (it did not begin until April 1982).
Jack Ryan uses an Apple IIe computer (released in January 1983).
Jack Ryan buys stock in Starbucks and, at an MI5 safe house in England, laments that the coffee he is drinking is not Starbucks (Starbucks did not offer stock to the public until 1992 and was virtually unknown until the mid-1990's).

One gets the sense that we are following the movements of Austin Powers in his time machine, not Jack Ryan. The Starbucks reference is particularly lamentable. In the movie, 'Forrest Gump', when Forrest's business partner buys him some Apple Computer stock, it is endearing; in 'Red Rabbit,' when Jack Ryan buys Starbucks stock, it is simply annoying.

Jack Ryan's admiration of Verdi's opera, 'Aida,' is similarly highly unlikely, since it was only re-popularized by Elton John in the late 1990's. More likely, it is a weak allusion to Mr. Clancy's second wife.

Finally, Mr. Clancy includes over a dozen references to men rushing to the bathroom to urinate. In Beverly Cleary's children's book, 'Ramona The Pest', the kindergarteners want to know how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom when he was operating his steam shovel night and day, digging the basement of the town hall; I doubt that the fans of Jack Ryan share that level of curiosity. One can only suppose that Mr. Clancy is experiencing problems with bladder control and now feels that it is an important factor in any storyline; a similar line of reasoning can perhaps be applied to his newly-found fascination with oral sex in 'The Bear And The Dragon'.

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Summary: DID CLANCY REALLY WRITE THIS?
Review: AFTER STRUGLING WITH BOREDOM FOR 200 PAGES, I FINALLY TOSSED THIS BOOK. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY