Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre
Review: This book is quite interesting and has its moments, though very few and far between, but it is quite possibly his worst novel.I actually enjoyed this one over The Bear and the Dragon but its about 300 pages too long. Its repetitive, long winded, and lacks suspense as everything is easy to figure out. When the defection finally happens, after about 500 pages of talking about it, it lacks that special something. The escape and Pope scene, which are the two main points of the book, both turn out bland and not that exciting when they happen. I hope Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy's last Ryanverse novel, turns out well because The Bear and now the Rabbit have been real stinkers.
Rating: 
Summary: By far the worst Jack Ryan book
Review: I thought long and hard before writing this review. I knew my complaints with Red Rabbit had much to do with my knowledge of what Clancy was capable of when working at full capacity, and that Red Rabbit was far from it. But what I had to decide was, is this a bad Tom Clancy book, or is it simply a bad book, period? It is a bad book, period. Like a amnesiac comedian, Clancy frequently tells the same jokes or aphorisms he's used before, sometimes from other books and sometimes from earlier in this same book. While in the past he has been a master at generating intrique, here he somehow manages to kill every possibility for tension within the story. I had no idea about the real history of the event depicted within, yet I never felt the slightest amount of tension over what was coming. It is the first Clancy book I have ever read that I can honestly say bored me. I don't even recommend this for Jack Ryan fans. Unless Clancy writes another book to tie this one even further into the series, you would be missing nothing if you entirely skipped over it. Save a tree.
Rating:
Summary: Should be subtitled: A Salute to Ronald Reagan.
Review: Never before has Clancy's ideological bent been so apparent. That said, it's still a pretty good story...hence the extra star.
Rating: 
Summary: Red Rabbit is good but not his greatest
Review: I liked the book but not a masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: A Battlefield in Hearts and Minds
Review: Set during the waning days of the Soviet Empire, Clancy's "Red Rabbit" is a political intrigue novel with a fictional exploration of the Cold War spy networks behind the Iron Curtain. I enjoyed the drama and slowly escalating tension as US and British operatives plotted to bring out a defector, code named "Rabbit", (Capt. Oleg Zaitzev) and subsequently foil a plot to assassinate someone "who does not deserve to die" - Pope John Paul II. Clancy's main character, Jack Ryan, does not play a heroic role in the defection. Instead, Ryan is shown as "learning the ropes" while largely observing the CIA in action. In this novel the wars are fought not on a battlefield, but in the heart's and minds of each character.
Some of Red Rabbit's shortcomings are inconsistencies with the behavior of characters and timeline of historical events. Such as: Ryan is longing to return to his family, is nervous, and has also picked up the smoking habit while in Budapest, but all these traits suddenly disappear when he's ordered off to Rome just a few days later. Also, the ocassional mention on the 1983 World Series does not correspond with Yuri Andropov's rise to leader of the Soviet Union (which would have already happened a year earlier) or the actual assassination attempt on the pope which was in May 1981.
Despite these and other shortcomings, I recommend the book to devoted Clancy readers and anyone with an interest in Cold War drama.
Rating:
Summary: How many pages does it take to share your thoughts?
Review: I really liked Tom Clancey's early books. They were full of action, and his scene changes were very effective in setting a tense atmosphere for his thrillers. Now, those same scene changes just take you to another character who has a paragraph of limited action and 4-6 pages of inner thoughts. If I didn't understand Communism or the Cold War, part of the book may have been interesting, but I do understand both. He spends too many pages on inner thoughts and very little effort on the story. His last book, I just gave up on, and put down after 200 pages. This one, I finally just skimmed the 4-6 pages of inner thoughts and moved to the next section. In that way, I found the book better. I don't know, however, if I will ever buy another Clancey book.
Rating:
Summary: A failure on many levels
Review: I have a shelf full of Tom Clancy novels, and have been a fan for years. Although I feel that the quality of the novels have gone down since Patriot Games, many still had some entertaining qualities, and I continued to purchase Clancy's books up until Bear & the Dragon, a novel of desperate literary devices and outright racism. I was excited about the prospect of another Jack Ryan novel, the early years which would explain how he came to be the man he was in earlier novels, and perhaps revisit a higher grade of writing reminiscent of Clancy's earlier novels. This book was long, repetitive, and uninteresting. I believe Clancy and the publishers hoped loyal Clancy fans would purchase the book, because this one in no way equals earlier volumes. I had hoped for a book that would revitalize a series that became stale, particularly by going back to the Jack Ryan character. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy for or guarantor of success. If you must read the book, borrow it from the library. Otherwise your time would be better served taking a nap.
Rating:
Summary: If you'll permit a dissenting vote...
Review: Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books of recent years have been real epics: they have rivalled Stephen King's blockbusters for size, and King himself called his own tendency in that direction "diarrhea of the word processor". This one's a little ole thing by comparison: only 600 or so pages. But think back to the oldies like "Red October", if you will. Those earlier efforts weren't exactly gargantuan either. And if you're expecting a lot of shoot-'em-up and aerial dogfights like Robby Jackson gets into off the USS Jerry Ford or whatever (or Mr. Clark's latest SEAL mission), maybe it will help to remember that Clancy's "Op-Center", "Power Plays" and "NetForce" action yarns are not only a separate body of work--Clancy doesn't even write those himself anyway. In the same way "Patriot Games" was a prequel to "Red October", this book is a prequel to "Cardinal Of the Kremlin", mostly covering the Foleys' "rookie season" in Moscow. People familiar with "Cardinal" will remember that the bulk of that book's narrative was a lot of Moscow intrigue based in the Politburo and Dzerzhinskiy Square. And I'm not really convinced that this book is necessarily a tie-in for the next Afleck movie. Not that I really think Clancy exactly scored in taking the Ryan saga back two decades--he didn't, not entirely. You will notice that Ryan often talks like more like his modern-day self than the talented rookie still in search of his identity as a character during the Reagan administration. Plus, I find Ed Foley's earliest contact with his first Soviet "source" a bit far-fetched. Read those scenes on the Metro with Zaitsev not entirely sure who Foley is other than an American who works at the Embassy, but the guy still passes Ed data that could land him in a basement interrogation room in the Lubyanka! He didn't get to the rank he holds with that kind of recklessness. But Clancy does bag 4 stars from me (instead of his usual 5) on the speculative premise of the KGB maybe pulling the strings of the attempted hit on the Pope back then. And he's just careful enough to keep Ryan on the fairly distant periphery of that "case". I'm just hoping that the next book which begins the career of "Little Jack" is believable. After all, when they did that same number in the form of "James Bond jr.", it was a Saturday morning cartoon adventure. I'll try to approach that one with a suitable mixture of open mind and healthy skepticism when I read it. I agree that Clancy has taken President Jack as far as he can as a lead player, but the logical move would be to continue the "Rainbow Six" series with Clark and son-in-law Chavez.
Rating:
Summary: The fun part is figuring out fact from fiction
Review: This book is a very good fictionalized account of the events leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union. You know that some parts actually happened (albeit not with Jack Ryan of course) and some parts are fiction to fill in the gaps, but which is which? The ending (which I won't give away) would explain an awful lot if it's true. Treat the book as a fun history lesson and you won't be dissapointed.
Rating:
Summary: Not so bad. . .
Review: I will beat a dead "rabbit" a little more here. I just finished "Red Rabbit" and I have to say I was shocked by the overwhelmingly negative response to this book. I found it refreshing that Clancy had taken a step back in time and substance from the recent books which take place in some alternate science-fiction reality where Denver was blown up, the legislature was wiped out, the U.S. went to war with Japan and India, and Jack Ryan is president. "Rabbit", though it deals with events the outcome of which we know, went back to the things that I enjoyed in "Patriot Games" and "Cardinal of the Kremlin", good old-fashioned sneaking-around spy stuff in a realistic setting. There are some mistakes here and there (for instance, Hungarian is not an "Indo-Uralic" language, it's just a plain Uralic language, or according to some linguists, a Uralic-Altaic language, but that's another story), and the first few chapters were not so exciting. However, the further I read, the more engrossed I became in the Foleys' tradecraft, the risks the Rabbit was taking in trying to prevent the assassination of the Pope, and whether he would make it out or not. As it concerns a plot to shoot the Pope, and we all know the Pope WAS shot, there is a great deal of tension as to what will happen to the Rabbit and his family. As for the profanity, some say they find it hard to believe that a PhD historian working for the CIA would use such naughty language. To that I can only say that you must not have worked for the government or met many professors outside the classroom at the local pub. I would gripe that a few of the internal monologues get a bit out of hand, especially Andropov's ruminations. I am also getting pretty tired of ophthamology in general in the Clancy books. Another big negative with this book is the relatively frequent typographical errors which are very annoying and should have been ironed out in a mass market publication like this. "Red Rabbit" is worth a read if you like espionage novels, are interested in the Cold War, or are a hard core Ryan fan. As a side note, I happened to read Robert Littel's "The Company" before I read "Rabbit" and the latter makes a nice sequel to the former as they both involve papal intrigues and "Rabbit" actually picks up around the time that "The Company" ends. Finally, I believe that Clancy needs to give up the Jack Ryan universe and start a new series that takes place in our reality where Clinton and W have been our presidents, where 9/11 happened, and where there is no such person as Jack Ryan. Clancy is coming to the local bookstore to hawk his latest book next week, so we'll see if he takes any guff over "Rabbit" there.
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