Red Rabbit

Rating:
Summary: come on amazon, make a 0 star option
Review: the tom clancy books are great and action packed, but this book is just a discrace

its DEFIDENTLY nto worth 20$, maybe its worth a dollor, but not $20

theres 0 action until your about 20-30 pages from the end of the book

basically, its like the first 400 pages are slow and all say the same thing

i'ld recommend any tom clancy book accept theis one to anyone

if your going to buy a tom clancy book, get a good one

Rating:
Summary: This book should of never been published...
Review: Red Rabbit....well there have been a lot of bad things about this book, so I am going to add more fuel to the fire. Red Rabbit takes place in the early 80's, we dont know because Clancy does not tell us, and by page 20 we know the plot of what the Soviets wanted to do; they wanted to kill the Pope because they feared if he retired the papacy and returned to Poland, then things could get a little hairy for the pro-Communist government there at that time. So comes in Jack Ryan; a younger and more enegertic man, and it takes place after Patriot Games (A great novel). So he comes back to London to work for the British government thanks to Admiral James Greer and Sir Basil Charleston. In Moscow, we then meet Mary and Pat Foley where they are keeping tabs on the Kremlin thanks to CARDINAL. So now as the book DRAGS on, we then meet Rabbit; a data-entry clerk who works deep in the Kremlin who then discovers the plot of the assassination of the pope. So now with this information, Rabbit then slips Pat a note telling him what is going on, it then goes back to Jack Ryan which he has to sneak out Rabbit out of the Soviet Union which went smootly. So now Rabbit tells Jack the plot since we have known this from page 20. So now it is off to Rome where the pope is shot, but not killed. So now as the ending feels rushed, Jack then feels stobbed because he could not stop the failed assassination.
So he heads back to London.

There is no suspense, and the book should of been 200 pages instead of the 620 pages. The editing is done HORRIBLY and just reading it left me in disquist and I felt I was robbed of my money when I brought this. Dont buy this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Rabbit Roadkill
Review: This is the worst Clancy book I've read to date and I think I've read every piece of his fiction. (That doesn't include the books that have his name on the along with a co-author which are clearly written by the co-author and his name is just window dressing.) Clancy's strengths are in the military strategy, the combat techniques, and action elements of his other books. I'm 1/2 way through the hardcover version (bought on discount from a discount table) and so far the entire book has consisted of people sitting in their office cubicles and homes. If I thought that was action, I'd peer outside my door at our office cubicle farm instead of reading. His attempt to make Jack into a stock market genius by "predicting" in the early 80s that a small Seattle coffee start-up would be a good investment or the constant creation of back stories to match the minor characters' histories from other books just comes off as clumsy and silly. I hope he sticks to what he does well in the future. I do applaud him for the courage to try something different but I hope he can see this was a weak effort.

Rating:
Summary: Pleeaaase get an editor with a full red pen!
Review: I have not read a Tom Clancy book since "Patriot Games". I thought this would be a good one to pick up since the chronology comes after that book. Wrong! What a waste of time. Is Clancy so big that he doesn't have an editor to redline his redundancies? There are so many references to Jack Ryan being a marine that I felt like I went to Paris Island. Reading Red Rabbit is like having dinner with a man who had once been somebody and now had to bore you to tears with the same stories you heard from him just 5 minutes before.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time
Review: Generally speaking I am a Clancy fan, but Red Rabbit has me wondering if Clancy has ran out of ideas. This book has been the hardest book for me to finish. If it was not for the fact that it was a Clancy book, I would have stopped reading it before the halfway point of the book. I kept waiting for the story to kick in to full gear, but it never did. This book, by no means is a thriller; it is more like an epic tribute to angst. The only reason I gave it 2 stars is because it did save me money on sleeping pills.

Rating:
Summary: Clancy's Nostalgia
Review: Red Rabbit seems to be a nostalgic return to Clancy's roots. I suspect he misses the thrill of writing The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin. He certainly refers to the latter enough times although they never touch base.

I read the Penguin edition which is over 900 pages and disappointed me from page 200 on. The back cover states that "he quickly finds himself debriefing a Soviet defector with an extraordinary story to tell...." I am not sure what they mean by 'quickly' but for me it meant sooner than page 800. I kept waiting for Ryan to interview the guy so we could get on with the suspense but it never happened. The first 700 pages dragged on repetitively and finally Ryan meets the Rabbit only to learn what they guessed 400 pages earlier - the KGB wants to assassinate the Pope. Off to Rome we go for a quick wrap-up and some linguini.

What was the point of this book? It wasn't suspense - we knew before we started that the Pope's life was in danger and that the Rabbit would convey that information. Hence we knew the Rabbit would escape the USSR. Certainly the conclusion couldn't have been the point because it lacks cohesion and any sense of suspense. Shouldn't we be worried about the Pope being assassinated? It seems that in writing about the past Clancy has become trapped in his alter ego of historian and tells this story as though it were history. History may be decided upon but suspense novels should create the illusion that anything is possible.

Even the small details of the subplot fail to find resolution. Clancy spends 20 pages complaining about the British medical system but we never learn the result of Lady Ryan's complaining to the supervisor about the other doctors going out for lunch in the middle of an operation and having a few beers. If you are going to include such vindictive at least make it appear to be part of the plot and tell us what happened.

This book made me want to read Cardinal of the Kremlin but I doubt I will bother picking up The Masque of the Red Death which will surely be the title of his next book. I'll stick to Poe. Overall a disappointing return to Clancy's past glory. They say you can never go home. Clancy tried but got waylaid somewhere in Bulgaria.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Clan$ey
Review: A 100 page, marginal, novel 'compressed' into over 600 pages, apparently to ju$tify the $8.00 price. Perhaps worth 99cents - or the value of a sleeping pill. Long, long LONG, needless descriptions of ...... nothing. Repetitious. Boring. Slow moving. He wants to convey to the reader (the few suckers there might be of us) that he knows about the ..... one time pad! And it's not a Maxi-pad. This is a 600+ page book that you will get mad about reading about page 200, but since you've invested all of that reading time, you'll keep hoping for somethng to pique your interest. You might get it in the last 50 pages or so. Maybe.

I wasted my money. More importantly, I wasted my time.

Rating:
Summary: Unfairly maligned, but certainly sub-par Clancy
Review: As the Amazon review of this book states, we, the readers, know what happens long before the characters. The story: a Russian communications clerk for the KGB learns of a plot to assassinate the Pope. He feels he has a moral obligation to warn the west to prevent the murder of an innocent man, and we follow his attempt to contact the CIA and defect with his information.

Anyone old enough to remember 1981 has a vivid memory of the attempt on the Pope's life, and how it turns out. However, most of the reviews of the book given on this website miss the point: this book is not about the assassination attempt, it is about the working of intellegence services (CIA, MI-5, and KGB) and how they try to sort out the wheat from the chaff and get reliable information.

The good points:
After the Bear and the Dragon, it's a tremendous relief to be back in "real life". So much baggage has built up in the Jack Ryan series (e.g., a war with Japan, a nuclear terrorist attack, a biological terrorist attack) that it's now a fantasy world with little basis in reality. By going back in time, Clancy has chosen an interesting and true event and seemlessly incorporated his fictional characters into reality. Most importantly: it's a page-turner. I'm sure the average reader will find much of interest to keep them reading until they finish the book.

Unfortunately, there are many bad points:
As stated by many others, this book seems to have escaped the attentions of any editors. It is rife with repetitions (I am not exaggerating when I say that Ryan's Marine Corps helicopter accident is mentioned 20 times). It would not surprise me if all of Clancy's books start this way - it seems like he just wrote it, then forgot to read it over to make sure it reads well. Likewise, others have pointed out that the plot is a little thin, which it is, but no thinner than Without Remorse, for example.

Basically it comes down to this: there's a good book in here, it just needed some padding out and an encounter with a red pen. Bottom line: I enjoyed it, more so than The Bear and the Dragon, but it's destined to remain a minor episode in the Jack Ryan Story.

Rating:
Summary: My Last Clancy Book
Review: I bought this book bcs I - like many other readers here - used to be a huge fan of Clancy's. My first book was Executive Orders, and the details in *that* book struck me as interesting, non-repetive, and not overtly wrong. From there I went through all his earlier works, and while The Sum of All Fears likely was foreboding of what came after EO still I can recommend those earlier works wholeheartedly (in particular Without Remorse).In addition to what readers have noted already on RR, what I found most deplorable are the endless, ever-repetetive yet over-simplifying ramblings on what the world was like at the height of the Cold War, accompanied by mostly irrelevant and thus distracting side information, and the fact that the book is replete with blatant displays of ignorance. To name but a few, life behind the Iron Curtain certainly did not start with TV in the morning (it didn't start at all until noon or so) nor with cereal for breakfast (unless you mixed it yourself). Also, Bach did not compose the Brandenb*e*rg but the Brandenb*u*rg concerti, this mistake's being a wide-spread one and probably attributable to the identical pronunciation in English not to the contrary. I have never heard of Hungarian-made VCRs being spread throughout the former USSR and Warsaw Bloc, either; in fact there was no such thing until the late 80's. Also, Hungary was not a destination for buying pantyhose and a certain kind of videotapes but mostly for buying blue-jeans and shoes of western design. Mistakes like these really kill the fun in reading the book. The reason why I finished it nonetheless is, and Clancy does deserve applause for this - probably involuntary - feature, the fact that the structure of most subchapters follows the same scheme: a quarter of relevant information (action, background info that actually is story-related, or dialogue) and thereafter three quarters of non-sense. As a reader, if you make it your habit to skip the latter and only read the former, you may gain a reading experience remotely resembling the Clancy of old, and actually leaving the impression of having read an altogether not-too-bad book (hence the 2 stars). However, reading barely mediocre books like jumping stones to negotiate a brook is not what I have time for, so sadly enough this sorry excuse for a "#1 NYT Bestseller" will be my last Clancy book ever.

Rating:
Summary: Tom, find an editor, PLEASE!
Review: Apparently many others have noticed that Tom Clancy keeps regressing as a writer/storyteller. His early books were fun to read. Now they are pompous, boring (excruciatingly so), arrogant and waaay too snidely political. This book, in paperback, ran to 636 pages. It would have been a much better book at 275 pages. Any good editor would have taken a red pen to this mess and fixed it; but, I suppose the name Tom Clancy carries too much weight in the publishing world to fool with. This, no doubt is or will change.
What we're witnessing here, I believe, is a self-destruction of mass proportions. Seeing him photographed in military gear on every back cover of every new book is nauseating. He never served, regardless the reason. That active military brass flock to him is only self-serving. It's their commercial for a higher defense budget.
Personally, when I read for entertainment, I don't want someone in my face with their political agendas, especially when they are so condescendingly written.
I believe it's time for Tom to fade into the sunset. The premise of this book is good: a behind the headlines look at how the shooting of the Pope may have been orchestrated; and how other elements tried to prevent it. Unfortunately, the writing swings from pseudo-philosophic to sophomoric. And do Russians really refer to each other by their "first" and "middle" names (Aleksey Nikolay'ch)?
Tom, I'm afraid neither Ronald Reagan nor Dubya can save you now. Go back and re-read your "Red Storm Rising"; see if you can recapture that touch.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Someone please help this guy!