Rating: 
Summary: Try again...
Review: If you love spy thrillers, then this may be interesting for you. Otherwise, you will be disappointed. Once you get to the meat of the story, the rest is totally predictable. Good guys learn what the bad guys are plotting and spoil their plans. All of this just wrapped in cloak and dagger plotlines.
Rating: 
Summary: Red Rabbit is a red herring
Review: Clancy has apparently followed the path of past successful writers: rest on your laurels by writing mediocre books and count on past readers to keep buying them. After reading 380 pages of Red Rabbit I am still waiting for a fully developed plot to appear, and even just a hint of action. So far, no success. What I have found is minute detail, most of which is useless and repeated ad naseum. For those of you hoping to gain insight on Ryan's beginnings with the CIA, you won't find it here. There's as much on his wife's "adventures" as an eye surgeon as there is on her husband, and there is more interesting detail on the early career of the Foley's than on Ryan. The book, in summary, is a ..., and hopefully Clancy won't try to dump on his faithful readers again as he has done with this one.
Rating:
Summary: Pathetic
Review: This book doesn't even rate 1 STAR!!!If you want to instantly put yourself to sleep then by all means buy this ... that wasn't even a 'co-authored' Clancy book! I have read all of his works including a few of the co-authored which I found extremely boring and put aside for charity! This would serve our forrests even better used as kindling in the fireplace during winter! Where's the plot? Why suddenly go back in time when Ryan was a rookie along with the others in his many chronicals? Clancy comes off being the rookie in this one! Every time I have heard of a new Clancy novel coming out I've looked forward to reading it for enjoyment and following the cast of characters thru their lives. Well, this time I will not be looking forward since he's now going backward! What a pity that Putnam needs so badly his name on the cover to sell books! My recomendation to any other Clancy or Le Carre like followers would be to look for a new author with wit and not just out for using his name to make money with this wasted book! Doug
Rating: 
Summary: OK but below par for Clancy
Review: This book occurs early in Ryan's career making it a diffcult story to write as everyone knows the history of Ryan and most of the main characters at the CIA from all the books he has written occurring later in time. Clancy has done a good job of squeezing it in, however, since this has happened in the past and is not significant enough to discuss in the future, the scope and importance of the situation had to be on a smaller scale so it is not much of a story and it is almost lost in his detailed telling. Also some sentences and a couple of paragraphs seem to be repeat multiple times - better editing should have been done. The main story is the KGB wants to kill the pope and the subplot is the Foleys starting their Moscow tour as head CIA there and trying to get out a supervisor in the KGB's main encryption group, whose main reason for leaving is that he was assigned to handle the communication for killing the pope and disagrees with it. It is a good story but below par for Clancy - I would have been really disappointed if I had paid the premium cover price, but at Amazon's discounted price it was a fair read.
Rating:
Summary: Very Slow Reading
Review: Tom Clancy is following in the steps of Stephen King. Just because one writes more verse, it does not mean there is quality there. This book rambles on about one of Clancys favorite subjects "the Catholic Church" But there is little bite to the plot, especially since you know how things will turn out. Entirely droll and predictable.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible.... the worst from Clancy EVER
Review: This book is horrible... even the Bear and the Dragon was better than this (and I also disliked that one). Even if we ignore Clancy's CONSTANT superficial right-wing rhetoric (not that is a bad political stance, only makes a VERY boring novel) the whole novel appears to have NO POINT. A man defects from the USSR without any problems, Ryan almost saves the day (but please... WE ALL KNOW THAT THE POPE WAS SHOT, hence there could be no suspense with that subplot). The whole novel appears only as a chance to show some more of Ryan's godlike prediction powers, for example he saw in the 80s Japan's economy going down, if the book had actually been PUBLISHED in the 80s that would actually impress me even if only by the boldness of the idea but predicting THE PAST is really easy (and again boring). The whole thing of the Foleys in Moscow is also really boring, we know they are still there in Cardinal of the Kremlin so how wrong could things really go??? Sure they act paranoid all the time and complain "are we paranoid enough" some 300 times in the book (which is again boring), but it's all empty since we know no major thing will go wrong here.
This leaves us with no interesting plot and only Clancy's rhetoric, for example he goes on and on about Cathy's misadventures in the British health care system and that WHOLE subplot leads NOWHERE. It serves NO purpose in the story, only Clancy controls the narrative to again hammer us with his political opinion (I even agree with him on this subject but certainly not due to the childish and one sided arguments he offers here). For example Cathy gets angry when doctors stop a surgery to go to lunch and have a beer (she was obviously angry for both). Clancy connects this to the public health system not being patient centered enough... well I guess there is no real medical malpractice in the US, only a bunch of lawyers who make things up for money (hell I even agree with most of his ideas on this subject however this topic DOESN'T belong to this book).
Even if we ignore the soporific plot and Clancy's childish arguments against certain policies the book also makes the now frequent Clancy mistake of being repetitious and overly long. The whole novel could easily fit 400 pages as opposed to the 700 it has. This doesn't help in the flow of the novel and it's REALLY annoying to read the same basic dialogue four to five times just for padding (what was his editor thinking???). This novel is FULL of descriptions of cups of coffee, routs people are taking inside buildings (and not important people for important parts of the novel, it happens all the time), same municipal descriptions (we get it, Moscow is bleak, on with the story), etc...
Also preoccupying is Clancy CONSTANT use of the same adjectives. The number of times he uses words such as "pshirnk" and "puke" is just ridiculous. It's as if he doesn't know any other way of saying the same thing (which believe it or not is a valuable tool to a writer).
And finally we get Jack Ryan AGAIN in the center of the storm. If it was silly before now it's just insane, future generations in this Clancy universe can play Where is Waldo with Ryan at almost every historical event of that timeline (after all he will always be somewhat in the picture). It's really time for a new character, maybe a whole new line of characters. So this is my last Clancy. After disliking most of his latest novels for being overlong, depending too much in a quick resolution, annoying and unnecessary political rhetoric and MANY other factors I finally see that he won't write anything as clever, original and EXCITING as Red October. Red Rabbit summarizes every bad quality of Clancy's later works.
Rating:
Summary: embarassing
Review: i hope this is the effort that finally catches up with clancy and exposes his limitations -- i hope it comes out that his last wife turns out to be the real author (ex. fick francis) this effort was an insult---there is no other way to describe it i give credit to his storytelling talents but there were maybe 200 pagesof quality in this effort this is just another example of the rich getting richer and an author not even willing to take a gamble -------lets put jack ryan as head of merrill lynch in this market and see what a hero is
Rating:
Summary: Shame, shame, shame, Mr. Clancy!
Review: Okay, so the plotline was decent. I learned a lot about the theory behind the ill-fated attempt on the pope's life. However, that's ALL I enjoyed. I'm angry about paying [dollar amount] for a sloppy piece of work. I feel like I've been ripped off. I'm disappointed with the poor sentence structure, the lack of continuity of facts, and the repeated attempts at humor, "My wife cuts into eyeballs." And the lawyer jokes. Please, Mr. Clancy! Find something else from which to extract black humor! And the "thought dialogue" Clancy uses to paint a picture of what men and women think about under stress doesn't take the reader anywhere important. At one point, Ryan is wondering, "why people arise early on Saturday and sleep in on Sunday." What does THAT have to do with the plot to kill the pope? Toward the end, Ryan is among a group of British agents who need Secret Service-type radio communications. Clancy has the characters practicing with the radios the day before. Good call. So WHY IS IT on the morning of the "big event" that we read an entire PARAGRAPH about one of the agents providing intricate detail for Ryan on how to operate the device? DIDN'T THEY DO THAT THE DAY BEFORE? And what about Ed and Mary Pat? They're the hero and heroines. Why didn't we see THEM celebrate or get a big pat on the back? Gosh, Mr. Clancy, I've always loved your stuff -- even the techno-details I might not understand. Your plots, your story line, your dialog -- all put your readers in a place we've never been before but, when something like 9-11 happens, we feel like we have a decent grasp of what's going on behind the scenes in the real world. That's because we trust your research and your understanding of black ops. I suggest that, if you're not willing to work hard anymore at being a writer, you quit cranking out sloppy fiction and stick with non-fiction. At least then you'll have ghost writers to blame for the poor work and, you'll still collect a fat advance and steady royalty checks. But remember kind sir, if the Clancy name no longer means what it used to mean in the way of entertaining and informative suspense, you and your publisher can forget about the big royalty checks. We -- your loyal readers -- will quit wasting our time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good, But . . .
Review: There's a very good story here. There's also too much detail/filler. Clancy has always used detail to enhance his stories well (create images of settings, add depth to characters, explain aspects of character's lives that many readers would be unfamiliar with, etc.), but he gets carried away here, and the pace of the novel is damaged, impairing the pace of the good story underneath the excessive detail. But, again, there is a good story in there.
Rating:
Summary: And if you go chasing rabbits .....
Review: 'And you know you're going to fall, When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead.' With apologies to Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) this book was a bad trip. First of all, the book was repetitive to distraction. How many times do we need to be told that Sir John is uncomfortable with his honorary title of Knight? How many times do we need to be told about the origin of the KGB HQ Bldg? Ok we now understand 'kulturniy', perhaps it was the tenth mention of it in Red Rabbit that did the trick. Also the interaction between Jack and his wife Cathy was at times poorly written, surely the fine surgeon doesn't pout when Jack is out of town for a few days or can't disclose his activities to her? Granted there were some interesting tidbits in Red Rabbit, but not 600+ pages worth. As a huge Clancy fan, I really am disappointed that he didn't take this opportunity to fully explain in more detail how close the former USSR already was to collapse at this point in time, and explain in far more detail the social/economic unrest in Poland that caused the domino effect in Eastern Europe when coupled with the West's aggressive military spending. Where were the other interesting subplots as demonstrated in Clancy's other novels to keep it far more interesting? Although I finished the book, consider yourself warned that there isn't much meat on this particular bone.
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