Rating: 
Summary: An utter waste of time
Review: I can only add, to what has already been written, the following: it was my immediate impression that this achingly slow and pained story had rested on Tom Clancy's office shelf for nearly 20 years and was brought out merely to fulfill an obligation to the publisher. the story is so lacking in suspense and so full of never resolved plot defects that it is truly hard to believe that this tome was written by the same hand that crafted stories the likes of "Cardinal of the Kremlin" et al. Frankly, I was hoping and praying that some of the idiotic plot twists would SOMEHOW get resolved or explained but that was not to be. too bad, I hope I am able to stomach another run at his latest work.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of time
Review: What were you thinking, Tom? This book was definitely inferior, and a waste of both time and money. Boring!
Rating:
Summary: Save a bullet for me
Review: At least that's what I told my wife if she ever saw me pick up a Tom Clancy book again. What a painful experience. There have been a lot of comments about the profanity in the dialogue but stupidity would be a larger concern. I have heard more intelligent conversations late at night at local beer joints than in these hallowed halls of government. It took Clancy (and us) 600 plus pages to get through a story that LeCarre would have made brilliant in half that space. Tom is like an aging ball player who has hung around too long. Hang it up partner and thanks for the memories.
Rating:
Summary: Tom Clancy is losing it
Review: Sorry Tom, but it's time for you to retire. For more than one reason, for all that matters.Two things come to mind after having read Red Rabbit. First, Tom Clancy is, as a true patriot should, taking the side of the american government in the conflict about how the international political game should be played in the post 9/11 world. It's a pity that Red Rabbit draws more attention to Tom Clancy's political views than to the story he's telling on the side and it's sure to scare off many of his european fans. Second, the depth, or rather the lack of it, of Tom Clancy's background research on european culture and history confirms the image we europeans have about americans being intellectually superficial. After having read the entire Jack Ryan saga and having been a die-hard Tom Clancy fan for his accurate analysis and background information, Red Rabbit has destroyed the image that I had of Tom Clancy as a thourough researcher and an impartial writer. Just curiosity and my hope that this was a mere slip of Tom's pen will make me read The Teeth of the Tiger after this. As for the book: the explanation of how a patriot's eyes are opened to see the truth behind his country's lies and how he turns on his own country because it is crossing a line of tolerable behavior carries a more interesting and important lesson than Tom's analysis and story-telling of the conspiracy theory around the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II by Ali Agda. I am sad. Tom Clancy is no more.
Rating: 
Summary: Clancy Slipping!
Review: The quality and readibility of the books of Tom Clancy keep
getting worse and worse.This book is just plain bad.The Russians
decied to assassinate the Pope.His opposition to their policies
and actions make him a marked man.The Russians bring in a hired
killer in the form of Agca.The Americans discover the plot and rush to stop it.No shots are fired until deep in the book.Then
the book finally comes to an end.This book does not even compare
with the quality writings that we have enjoyed in the past.Those
were the good old days. I hope that Tom Clancy rediscovers his
old self.
Rating:
Summary: Not ready for reading
Review: I remember the night I started reading his earlier book, Red October. I was down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Dawn the next day found me literally holding my eyes open with my fingers to get to the end. That will not happen to anyone with this book. It is simply too formulaic. While Frederick Forsythe could turn an even less successful attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle into the very suspenseful Day of the Jackal, Clancy has much less luck with the attempt on the life of the Pope. The idea actually has the potential for Clancy to have made a much better story, but he wastes it on showing how much he knows about the arcane world of spies and counter spies and on how much he thinks America is better than Soviet Russia was and how many hot stocks Ryan can identify before they take off. Sort of John O'Hara of the Big Board. There was never a willing suspension of disbelief and this book badly needed at least one, or two.
Rating:
Summary: Shouldn't have started
Review: Despite the numerous poor ratings, I gave this a shot. Like so many others, I was very disappointed. It's not an action story - there's three shots fired around page 625. It's not a spy story - every "spy-like" effort goes perfectly and there is little ... actually no ... intrigue. Everyone has a bad day, and I'll give Tom Clancy another chance on his next book. But once I started I felt compelled to finish in the hope that it would get better. It didn't. If you are looking for classic Clancy fiction, take my advice - skip this one.
Rating: 
Summary: the weakest offering in the Ryanverse.
Review: This book was a step backwards for Tom Clancy in several ways. With the exception of Without Remorse (which detailed the origins of John Clark), Clancy's novels have been fairly chronological. Red Rabbit takes to a time shortly after Patriot Games but still before the events in Red October. Jack Ryan has only recently joined the CIA (instead of being President as he was in Bear and the Dragon). He is assigned a job in London working as an analyst and assisting the British Intelligence Agency (MI-6). Much of Ryan's part in Red Rabbit involves what is little more than an introduction to his character....a character that we are already well familiar with by this point. I suppose Clancy is showing us how Ryan became the man we meet in later books, but to me it felt like unnecessary exposition. The main thrust of the story involves a Soviet (because we are now back in the early 80's during the Reagan administration) plot to kill the Pope. This links up with the true life attempt of the life of the pontiff and since none of the other Jack Ryan novels references an assassination of the Pope, we know from the start what the end is. This removes most, if not all, of the dramatic tension in the novel. What is interesting about this book is not the plotting to kill the Pope, or even Jack Ryan's section of the novel, but rather with the tension involved with the conscience of a Soviet KGB Communications Officer who learns of the plot. This ties in with Ed and Mary Pat Foley, who are the only interesting American characters in the book. Readers will recognize the Foleys from previous Clancy novels. As they are active participants in the novel (unlike Jack Ryan), their part is interesting both as narrative as well as for the characters themselves. To be perfectly honest, this is a very weak offering from Tom Clancy. I expect more from him because he has raised the bar awfully high. I can only recommend this book to fans of Clancy who wish to read the entire Jack Ryan series, but even for these people I must recommend that they go in with low expectations...maybe they will be surprised. As for me, I look forward to reading Teeth of the Tiger and hope that it is a return to form for Tom Clancy.
Rating:
Summary: Good premise, poor execution, no editing
Review: Nobody can fault Tom Clancy for his plot ideas. Red Rabbit takes the real life shooting of the Pope in 1981 by the enigmatic (read weird!) Mehmet Ali Agca and poses an interesting question - what if this was actually an attempt by the USSR to silence the pope on the issue of Poland? A cypher clerk within the KGB pieces together various messages and realizes what the target is. At this point his conscience sounds an alarm; can he allow this to continue? Must he defect so as to warn the Western world? Should he run - in CIA parlance, become a Rabbit? Meanwhile Jack Ryan has been seconded to work with the British in London for a couple of years. He's right in place to work issues requiring cooperation between the US and the UK governments. Although he's an analyst at heart, he has seen action before and surely he'll see it again? Using this as a basis, a tight, gripping, suspenseful thriller could have emerged as the CIA and MI6 attempt to get their Rabbit out of the USSR and try to protect the Pope's life. Alternatively we could have had an intriguing insight into the motivations of a defector. Unfortunately Tom Clancy succeeds with neither. There is practically no suspense in this book. In fact at times I threw my hands up in the air and wondered why on earth Clancy hadn't introduced a problem, a conflict at key points that seemed to be crying out for one. An example: We are told about the randomness of searches on the workers leaking the KGB HQ - great, that sets us up for a thrilling sequence where our Rabbit might get caught. Nope, we get absolutely nothing along these lines. No tension, no signs that it might happen, no fretting. Nada! It's almost as if Clancy was trying to write a novel where nothing really happens - that he wanted to show a more random nature to the spy game. Well, it didn't work for me. He also wants to dig into the psyche of these individuals, I feel; unfortunately he's no John Le Carre and what we get is repetitive, boring, rambling. The repetition in this book is almost unbelievable - there seems to have been zero editing even of the basic kind, let alone the more brutal editing that was necessary. Some parts of the book let us in on the lives of the families but, for the most part, they are just irrelevant. Cathy Ryan has started a new job in London too at a prestigious hospital - great, but I don't need to hear about it unless it actually ties into the story! Clancy uses his setting in England to display his knowledge of British phrases - he actually uses the word "loo" without explanation at one point! ;) For the most part this is OK but there were a few things he got wrong that jarred me, a Brit who's lived in the US for a few years. One thing that really annoyed me was that he seems to think that the problem with Britain's National Health Service is due to lazy doctors who run out to the pub in mid operation. There's plenty of problems with the NHS but it's not lazy, incompetent doctors that are the issue! On the plus side the book is relatively easy to read. Although it's overly long and repetitive, the pages go by quickly and it would be perfect for it's target location - the airplane! It was also interesting seeing a book set in the early 80s but written today. You could tell that it wasn't written at the time it was set but, on the other hand, it's not long enough ago that it seems historical. In conclusion, I wouldn't get this book unless you are a huge Tom Clancy fan or have read everything else in the airport's bookstore!
Rating:
Summary: One of the worst books I've ever struggled through.
Review: I like Tom Clancy. With the exception of the new hardcover now out, I've read all of the books he alone has written. One of my favorite books by any author is his "Red Storm Rising." However, this one, by far, is his worst. It is also one of the worst books I've ever completed reading. I wonder if Clancy was really the author. He (or his characters) drone on and on endlessly discussing the same internal questions over and over. Was this book ever reviewed by an editor? I suspect it wasn't. If the fluff could have been removed from this junk it would have been at least 25% shorter. Even if you're a Clancy fan, skip this one. You won't be sorry.
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