Rating: 
Summary: Bad
Review: Tom Clancy is good at two things-- action, and the description of military equipment. He has always been terrible at everything else.This book is everything else--an utterly tedious work where the reader is forced to wade through some 600 odd-pages of Mr. Clancy's vulgarity and mindless conservatism without any action or the description of any military equipment at all. Clancy has apparently forgotten why people buy his books.
Rating: 
Summary: old fashioned Cold War thriller
Review: In 1981 Pope John Paul II threatens Moscow and Warsaw that if the repressive government does not ease off the people he will resign his current position and return to his native Poland, causing an international incident. Hard line Soviet KGB leader Yuri Andropov refuses to sit idly by and accept the Pope's intimidation. Historian Jack Ryan conducts research in England when the CIA and the British SIS recruit him as an analyst. Jack learns from a defector that Andropov plans to assassinate the Pope. Even for the Russian Bear that seems farfetched, but then again sending a confrontational message involving world affairs appears out of the ordinary for the Papacy. Still Jack needs to find confirmation that Andropov has decreed that Pope John Paul II must die. If he finds his evidence, the tyro spy knows he enters a realm that his entire life has not prepared him for in the slightest, as he must find a way to keep the Pope safe from the Soviets. RED RABBIT is a clever prequel that places Jack at the beginning of his espionage career. By doing this, Tom Clancy enlivens his hero, yet keeps his core values consistent with the other novels. The story line is exciting as the rookie Jack seeks proof while engaging in a battle of wits though readers will wonder why the novice has such responsibilities with something of this magnitude. Still Jack is back doing what he does best, leading to the audience enjoyment of an old fashioned Cold War thriller. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: This is the 2nd Clancy book I have read, and I really liked it. It wasn't quite as good as The Hunt for Red October, but it came pretty close.
The only real things wrong with it were: 1) there were too many typos. Clancy should get a new editor. 2) It gave away a lot of events from Patriot Games, a book which I haven't read yet. 3) In Red October, Ryan says he hasn't been 'in the field' before while working for the CIA, and yet he goes into the field in this book. 4) This book is set almost immediately before Red October, but the head of the Russian government is Brezhnev instead of Narmonov, and the U.S. President is Reagan instead of an unnamed former D.A.
All in all, a great book. It almost made a 5-star rating, except for the problems I listed above. (What I'm really saying is: buy this book! It may not be perfect, but buy it anyway, or at leat borrow it when it comes into a library! If you're a Clancy fan, buy it! If you're not a Clancy reader, this is a good starting point!)
Rating: 
Summary: Tom Clancy? Meet Jenny Craig!
Review: First of all, I have to say that I am a huge Tom Clancy fan but "Red Rabbit" REALLY put that to the test. I normally love seeing continuing characters inserted into "real" history. C. S. Forrester's Hornblower is a perfect example of how this can be done with hardly a ripple and Tom could learn a lot from him. A better plot would have been to have dropped Mr. Clark into Sophia to try and uncover the plot and then barely fail in an attempt to stop the assassination. But, then, that wouldn't have generated another script treatment for Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan. In fact, I almost could hear the AFLAC spokesduck quacking out "Affleck!" throughout the book. Maybe I'm wrong but... Anyway, to the book. It's been a long time since I had to force myself to finish a book by an author that I liked but this read was work. Hard work. I, for one, always have found the relationship of Jack and Cathy Ryan to be wooden and stilted but there were always other exciting sub-plots running in the background that eventually drew us mercifully away. Not here. They are like Luci and Desi on Prozac. Several times I caught myself fantasizing about Cathy hitching a ride on the Popemobile and taking one or two for the Pontif. But I digress. I have long ago accepted Clancy's difficulty in showing a believable man-woman relationship just like I have given up on ever seeing John Grisham end a book well. Heavy sigh! I've run on way too long but here's the book in a nutshell. No real drama or suspense as to the outcome. Too much of Jack and Cathy. No entertaining side issues or sub-plots. Not even any good jingoistic rhetoric. Too big to be so dull. C'mon, Tom!
Rating:
Summary: Too much and not enough
Review: Somewhere buried in this bad 618 page novel is a good 100 page novella. Clancy (or his editors) should have made the effort to publish that novella instead of "Red Rabbit". Clancy who, in the past, has had a tendency to take his plots to the point of over-complication (and sometimes past that point) went too far in the opposite direction here. The outcome of this novel is obvious within the first 25 pages and the depictation of that outcome occurs within the last 25 pages; leaving the five hundred pages in the middle for repeated scenes of various characters having meetings to discuss what's happened, descriptions of characters traveling from place to place, and prolonged passages of characters thinking about what's happening. Even in cases where Clancy seems to be foreshadowing a plot twist, nothing comes of it (was I the only one who thought Mrs. Zaitzev was going to refuse to defect at the last minute?) The closest thing to a sub-plot in this book is when Clancy starts whining about the evils of socialized medicine. That and an attempt at historically revising Reagan's foreign policy seems to be the reason this book was written.
Rating:
Summary: The (YAWN) Education of Jack Ryan
Review: Once again, Tom Clancy has written a crackling thriller, delving into the heart of the CIA operations - in this case, the exfiltration of a KGB defector with information on the plot to assassinate the Pope. Unfortunately, he has buried it in a surplus 300 pages of turgid prose, clumsy attacks on the usual suspects in Clancyland (including the Soviets, the New York Times, politicians and liberals of every stripe are the biggest threat to American democracy), and mind-numbing detail about the process for getting a document from Langley to Moscow. How many trips by Jaguar from the airport to British Secret Service by one-appearance non-entities, whose drivers are even named, does it take for us to get the picture, Tom? Possibly worst of all, though, are the repeated scenes in the first 400 pages of the book. Yuriy Andropov, KGB Chair and heir to Brezhnev's throne, has a cynical thought about personal power handed to him through Marxism-Leninism. 3000 miles away in London, CIA novice analyst Jack Ryan speculates that Andropov is having such thoughts. 6000 miles away, a Greek chorus of CIA administrators speculates that Ryan is having such thoughts about Andropov having such thoughts. Intersperse with scenes of a conscience-stricken KGB communications officer and the CIA Station Chief he miraculously contacts the first day of his spiritual crisis. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat a third time, moving the story forward by microscopic increments. Hey Tom, the secret to multiple plotlines is to have them all advance the story then come together in a little thing storytellers like to call a CLIMAX. At last comes the great defection scene, which is pulled off without a hitch. Ditto the interrogation of the defector. Ditto the decision to send Ryan to Rome to almost single-handedly prevent the Pope's assassination, which at this point every sentient reader knows both happened and failed to kill the Pope. Clancy's solution? Have Ryan capture the link between the assassin and the KGB. The whole Italian sequence lasts about 50 pages, mostly interspersed with commentary on the quality of Italian beer and coffee. At this point, having wrung every drop of melodrama from the plot, Clancy has Ryan return to Washington to off-handedly suggest that the Soviet's greatest weakness is - gasp - their economy. Well, who knew? Throughout, Clancy's need for an editor and proofreader is evident. Not only is the same Andropov-Ryan-Langley sequence repeated too frequently, we also have Ryan frequently observing that little girl's hugs are special, riding the train (every day, for God's sake) with his wife, and pointless though frequently reiterated asides about the virtues of free market entrepreneurs compared to stifled government bureaucrats. In the last third of the book, Clancy even switches the name of the KGB-backed assassin with one of his victims. Shows what happens when an author can bypass the publication process and send his material direct from his computer to the printer. All in all, this is one fantastic doorstop. When an author like Clancy has to go back to the beginnings of his protagonist's career to sift for material, we can only hope that his creative days are almost over, and that he can rest on the laurels of his 6 good books. Too bad he didn't draw the line a little earlier.
Rating: 
Summary: Sympathetic characters but peters out at the end
Review: I guess people don't buy Clancy novels for well drawn characters but that is this novel's virtue. I think most readers will be intrigued and sympathetic toward Jack Ryan and the Russian defector. The story just runs out of gas at the end. Perhaps it is because the reader knows how it is going to end. Perhaps it is because a new set of characters who are not as well drawn as the previous characters have to be introduced at the end.
Rating:
Summary: Worst Clancy book, from a HUGE fan
Review: I must say that finishing this 618 page book was a challenge. I never thought I'd say that about a Tom Clancy novel, but I have to. The writing was sub-par, there were many trivia references which were repeated two, three, even four times in later passages which makes me think that either the editing was poor (there were also grammatical errors) or that Mr Clancy wrote this in such a disjointed fashion that he never realized. Jack Ryan came off as a whining, pushy and obnoxious character, in my opinion. Finally, given the historical context of the plot, it seemed like Clancy had a novel of maybe 200 pages and used long, boring, winded passages of nothing to fill in the other 400 pages. It was like reading Moby Dick, where Melville takes 5 pages to describe a sail. Even though I knew the outcome of the event, I still expected suspense leading up to it, during the Rabbit's escape, the Rabbit's debriefing, and/or the actual shooting of the Pope. I have every one of Clancy's "Jack Ryan Series" novels, and every year I seem to reread them a bit and never tire of them (my wife thinks that's very odd, among other things), but I can guarantee that I will never read this one again. Given the less than spectacular last novel, The Bear and the Dragon, I think that Clancy is just sick of this series and doesn't really know what else to do or how to stop it, and I feel like a ... for filling his coffer.
Rating:
Summary: Still a disappointment
Review: Right after I knew Clancy "produced" another Jack Ryan book. I really hoped it would be somehthing different from the disastrous The Bear and The Dragon. However, he failed me again. Tom Clancy seems to lose his edge forever.
Rating:
Summary: Sleeping won't be a problem
Review: Dull and uneventful have never described Clancy's books until now. If not for his writing style and my love for Jack Ryan's world, I would have tossed this book after the first 100 pages. In fact, the book could have been about 300 pages shorter and would have the same impact for the reader. Not intriguing. Not interesting. Not thrilling. A few fun tidbits. But way too much Ryan talking about his financial savvy, kids glued to VCRs, and topics discussed repeatedily when once would have had a better effect. Of course, Clancy sets up his next book when it appears Jack Ryan will be an instrumental part in Reagan's plan to out spend Russia and crush their economy. So unless you're an econ major, that will be a snoozer.
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