Rating: 
Summary: Waving the White Flag
Review: Like most of the other reviewers here, I used to be a big Clancy fan. As usual, I bought this book the day it came out and hoped that the last novel (The Bear and the Dragon) was an aberration. Wrong! This book proves (at least to me) that Tom Clancy's interest isn't in writing good books anymore, but rather collecting his royalty checks. He's given up. Put a fork in him.Believe the reviewers here who say that nothing happens in this book-- it's true. This is a 100 page novel stretched into 600+. Even as a 100 page novel, it wouldn't be very good. The plot is simple-- The Soviets want to kill the Pope; a Russian defects and tells the Americans/British; Jack Ryan tries to prevent the assassination, but fails. While the defection had possibilities of being exiting (remember The Cardinal of the Kremlin?), Clancy makes it boring (get in the back of a truck, drive accross the border and board an airplane for London). As for the assassination attempt, let's just say that for drama, it's no Day of the Jackel. But no one pays $$$ for 100 page novels (especially those with Clancy's name on the cover). So Clancy needed to provide the fill. A typical chapter is as follows: Person wakes up. Person eats breakfast. Person goes to work on a train/subway. Person has deep philosophical thoughts. Person goes home. Person talks with wife. Person goes to bed. Next chapter, same thing, but with a different person (although for some reason, the deep philosophical thoughts remain the same). This goes on and on and on WITHOUT ANYTHING HAPPENING! In addition, for a guy who supposively is into detail, Clancy drops the ball here as well. The novel takes place in 1981 (easily verified because that's when the Pope was actually shot), but Clancy has Ryan bragging about the Starbucks IPO (which didn't take place until 1992). The Foley's (who I found kind of dull) apparently got out of Iran just before the embassy was taken over in November 1979 because they were about to have a baby. In Red Rabbit, the baby should be about 18 months old, but instead is 4 and is constantly watching the Transformers, a cartoon show that didn't debute until September 1984. Clancy has Baltimore and Philadelphia playing in the World Series (it was actually the Dodgers and the Yankees in 1981; Baltimore and Philadelphia played each other in 1983). Adm. Greer keeps talking about the Orioles' rookie shortstop being something special. (Well, I guess you could call Cal Ripken's .128 batting average (over 39 at-bats) in 1981 special.) All of this stuff was easy to figure out, which begs the question-- if Tom's not trying, why should we? Please save your money and your time-- they are better used elsewhere, I promise.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Jack Ryan Book So Far
Review: I have to say I was pretty disappointed with this book. I think the same story could have been told in a book about a third of the size. Clancy repeats himself continuously and parts of the book even seem out of order, confirming my believe that Clancy writes his books in parts and sews them together at the end. I plodded my way through this book, reading an endless amount of rhetorical questions, waiting for some sort of Clancy pay off and was bitterly disappointed. A long time ago, Jack Ryan history left real world history. They shouldn't be merged back together, should they?
Rating:
Summary: Time to reread the earlier books
Review: What was he thinking when he wrote this? I need another few million bucks? As his novels have evolved, you tend to wait longer for the action to occur. But it finally occurs in the other novels. Not in this one. Absolutely nothing exciting happens. If you want an inside look at the spy business, this will be of some interest. If you want entertainment, start with Red October and read forward.
Rating:
Summary: Clancy has written some great books, this ain't one of them!
Review: Let me start by saying that Clancy is by far my favorite author and has written some of the best modern American fiction in our time. Unfortunately, this book was the most disappointing of the lot. The build up tension was great, up until a certain point in the book, then it just got boring. The ending was entirely too predictable. I think it's time for Clancy to just end the Jack Ryan saga, revisit what made his first books so great, and start again with fresh new characters. Sorry Tom, you've just written far better books than this one.
Rating:
Summary: Oh dear.
Review: Well I don't really know where to begin. I hadn't read a Clancy book in a while because he was feeling a bit stale. But I came back to him for this one and found it to be hit and miss. Some great bits. Some flashes of old form. But largely this just feels thrown together. One for a completist I think.
Rating:
Summary: Dead Habbit - reading Clancy's books that is.....
Review: I used to love reading Clancy books every other August when they came out. I literally have planned camping trips around the release day so I could relax in Yosemite and read the newest thriller in the Jack Ryan series.
Never again. This book was never finished by Clancy who evidently finally realized that he could write a blank book with his name on it and it would be a best-seller. After reading red rabbit I wish he would have.
The same conversations repeated by the same characters over and over again.
Anachronisms that were never edited out.
Scenes set up for something exciting to happen but the action was never inserted.
Adds absolutly nothing to what we know about Jack Ryan.
Adds absolutly nothing about what we know of the attempted assissination of the Pope.
Adds absolutly nothing but frustration to the lives of those who struggle through this book.
Rating:
Summary: the more things change...
Review: Looks like a manuscript that was rejected in his early days, and pulled out of the bottom drawer to cash in on his current popularity.It would have been interesting to see how a Bulgarian Aparatnik recruits a Turkish hit-man, but we never do. A little therapy might clear up that fear of flying.
Rating:
Summary: Too long, too sloppy, too boring
Review: The Hunt for Red October was a taut, thin book that crackled with authenticity. Books like this require such perceived authenticity in order for the reader to suspend disbelief. Only when the narration in Red October wandered into areas in which I am technically expert did I find errors. Red Rabbit is a flaccid, long book filled with obvious errors that jar the reader and make it impossible to view it as having any semblance of authenticity. The book revolves around a historical event: the assassination attempt upon the Pope in St. Peter's Square in Rome on May 13, 1981. In the book, the assassination takes place during the World Series. Clancy is specific about the Heathrow terminals used by Jack Ryan, and on many flights he uses Terminal 4, which was actually opened to passengers in 1986. His characters often speak in late-1990s slang. Clancy puts a V8 engine in Ryan's Jaguar; it would have been an in-line six or a V12. Clancy has Jack Ryan investing $100K in Starbucks before the start of the book, but the Starbucks IPO was actually in 1992. There's no point to any of these departures from fact. They don't move the story along, or avoid explanations that would distract the reader. They're just sloppy. When Clancy wrote Red October he was poor and had a day job, and his first work rang true. Now, he's rich and can afford an army of people to run down facts and search for anachronisms, but he doesn't bother. It seems like he's just cranking out the books to get the public's money without putting in the effort to do a credible job. Makes me feel cheated. All this might be forgiven if the story keeps you turning pages into the night, but it's soporific. I might be charitable if the characters seemed palpably real, but they are overdescribed cartoons. It's a shame; Clancy could do better than this if he wanted to.
Rating:
Summary: Least impressive of the series
Review: It is gratifying (and, to me, somewhat surprising) that virtually all the reviewers here have made the same points, because they are very much on target. This is the most disappointing of the Clancy series. I'm not saying "worst" only because Clancy is technically good enough so that anything he writes himself (but not the excreble stuff written by others for which he sells his name) is at least readable. But Red Rabbit will be a major, major let down for Clancy's legions of fans. Whether or not you liked the somewhat racist and hyper-sexual "Bear and Dragon", you'll find that in this book Jack Ryan is quite different than anyone you've seen before. He is whining, foul-mouthed, not particularly security conscious (400 pages are devoted to covering up an ultra-top-secret defection, and then Ryan blithely gossips about it to a bunch of junior CIA guys??), and endlessly repetitive. Because this novel had to fit in between Patriot Games and Red October, and yet hadn't been referenced in any of the other books, the result is a relatively unimportant (in the Clancy universe) episode, which has the effect of marking time in the lives of the usual characters. Much as I love the series (even with Clancy's politics-on-his-sleeve, plug-his-friends, black-and-white jingoism) I'm afraid that something went far astray here. Maybe he has run out of steam with Jack, or he's written himself into a corner, or he just did this for the money. But the result is something that should be avoided by all new readers and most casual readers. The die hard fans will, of course, need to read this one for completeness' sake, but anyone else will unquestionably wonder what all the fuss is about. In the future, I think that most of Clancy's fans would hope that he either comes up with some plausible future stuff after Bear and Dragon, or gives us some more Rainbow adventures, or perhaps gives us some Mr. Clark black operations in the years between Remorse and October. He might even, if necessary, jettison the whole lot and write about something else entirely. But I'm really afraid that one more sleeper like this one has the potential to completely ruin the franchise.
Rating:
Summary: You can afford an editor, can't you?
Review: There is nothing worse than a six hundred page book that could benefit from not just good, but ANY editing. It is incredibly annoying to have the same trite metaphor, or the same random fact (dropped in to demonstrate that the author is clearly in the know) repeated within two or three pages of each other....multiple times within the book. Sometimes, it appears that Clancy writes each chapter, and other than the basic plot line, completely forgets what he has written, and so uses the same literary devices over and over. Yes, it is an interesting premise, but the writing has devolved so far in the past couple of years as to distract from the story. Please. Please. Hire an editor, and let them edit your books.
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