Rating: 
Summary: Ops Center class writing/plot
Review: Will the real Tom Clancy please stand up! The writing style along with the overall pace and plot of this one left me disappointed. Did Tom really write this one? An earlier review suggested the pace picked up after the 1st 200 or so pages...it might have gone from a half-step to 2/3 of a step per hour. His other classics (Hunt for Red October, etc. are by comparison, one-hundred steps per hour). Clancy has been taken off my 'automatic buy' list.
Rating: 
Summary: Move on!
Review: It is obviously time for Mr. Clancy to move on in his career and get away from Jack Ryan. He has run out of interesting story lines for the character. The book has a mildly interesting story line, but it just seems like you wait the whole book for something out of the ordinary or unpredictable to happen and it never does. I generally get through a new Clancy novel in 3 days or less. This one took me a month! I just couldn't get into it.
Rating:
Summary: This book is horrible and I'll tell you why
Review: Tom Clancy is a pretty good writer. He is excellent at plotting but only average at characterization. Clancy's best books have been ones that covered worldwide plots and many angles of deception and violence. Red Rabbit is similar to some of John Grisham's latest works. The author hasn't changed, but the subject matter is extremely boring or simple.The jacket to Red Rabbit makes it sound like the defection of a KGB officer leads to a world-wide conflict. In reality, Red Rabbit is only about getting an defector out of the USSR. Then, the last 50 or so pages, some action is thrown in and the US and British try to stop an assasination attempt on the pope. In usual Clancy fashion, he skips around from story line to story line. But in this book, very few of the story lines are interesting. Clancy repeats himself in several cases by offering repetitive views of the homelife of the Ryans (ride to work, nanny, baby sleeping, Sally watching TV, British food, Cathy and the British medical industry) and the Foleys (kid watches Transformers, Mary Pat is pretending to be a dumb blonde, etc.) Half of this stuff doesn't matter one bit. But Clancy seems intent on not leaving out even one minute detail of the lives of these characters. Also, many references are repeated such as Jack being a knight, and agents being called spooks. With a good author, you wouldn't notice these things or wouldn't be annoyed by them. To put it simply, this book has about enough drama, action and suspense to be a 200 page story. Instead it goes on for 600 pages. That right there tells you that 400 pages are filled with meaningless drivel. Clancy hits at the end that there will be a sequal based on the fall of the USSR. Hopefully it will be full of more action, and less stereotypical characterization.
Rating:
Summary: tom clancy should be ashamed
Review: This book was a mess. Mr. Clancy creates bad characters in a lackluster plot. There's no action, and the dialogue seems like its written by some fourth-tier college drunk frat boy. Do yourself a favor and read Demille or the late and great Mr. Ludlum. Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck--both deserve a whole lot better than this.
Rating:
Summary: Over and Out, Mr Clancy
Review: If one bothers to read a previous (August 29, 1999) Amazon[.com] review of mine, of Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October", one can find some perplexity about Jack Ryan's future career: after all, one cannot go much higher up than the presidency of the USA., and he's still relatively young... Mr Clancy must have recognized the snag, but - after all - that fat cow the reading public is still there, the publisher is still willing to shell out those very substantial advance payments... and, in this book, he goes back to roots. We find Jack again at the beginning: a self-made guy who's amassed personal wealth on the stock market, he's lured into a job with CIA as an analyst. Hence, all of the happenings in Clancy's books are a chronological sequence to the plot of this one, and the taste is that of warmed-up soup. In the following books (with a side-excursion into Mr Clark's misterious past, "Without Remorse"), we find him working for Foggy Bottom until the situation sublimates and he's kicked up to the presidency of the U.S., first by "traumatic succession", then by election: down to "The Bear and the Dragon" (© 2000). This book (© 2002), written with a 20/20 author's foresight (really, hindsight) of Jack's epics in the following years, is just as lengthy, dragging and tiring as the preceding one, "The Bear and the Dragon"....The only better feature over "The Bear and the Dragon" is that the pages of this one are a little more than 600, versus the 1,100-plus of the other one - but it's still graphorrhea.
Rating: 
Summary: A contrary opinion
Review: Okay, it's not a technothriller, a lot of the dialogue is a bit corny, but it's still a Clancy page turner based on a real life event. Jack Ryan is a bit of a wimp but it's a fun look at the days of the Cold War CIA and KGB cloak and dagger stuff. Not all of the characters are developed as well as others but it is a good yarn and I devoured the more than 600 pages in record time.
Was it worth the time and money? I give it a yes.
Rating:
Summary: If I could leave a negative star I would
Review: This book is his worst. I am glad that I bought it used as to pay full retail for it would have been an even worse insult.
I have read all of his books that he has written and he has not written one in years that was good. It is like he and another writer who has rode the gravy train of a one character series have lost sight of what a good book entails. Read Jack DuBrul for something new and refreshing, or waste [the money] and buy this doorstop.
Rating:
Summary: BOOORRRRING
Review: This book is utterly boring! Everything goes according to plan from start until 3 pages before the finish. If I read the words "works for me", "...,ok?", "right pal" again, I'll slap Clancy myself. They mention Ryan's time in the marines about 300 times. Completely dull.
Rating:
Summary: I'm a woman who reads Tom Clancy
Review: I'm almost ashamed to say that it took me well over a month to read Red Rabbit. Usually I neglect my family and read until the Tom Clancy book is finished! The background information was interesting, and maybe this is really the way spy work goes, but the whole book I was waiting for something to happen. We are used to it taking half the book to set up all the pieces of the action, then the action happening, and the rest of the book detailing the aftermath. Nothing happened. Nothing really went wrong. No one was in danger. Nothing. I even expected something more to be said about Cathy's frustrations with the British surgical system, but nothing. I will continue to read Tom Clancy, but most likely will not rush out to buy the book on it's first day available. Mr. Clancy can even continue to fill in some of the background info about his characters. But it's more interesting if something actually happens in the story.
Rating: 
Summary: Some Good, More Bad and Ugly - Wait for the Movie
Review: This review is written by a huge fan of Tom Clancy. By far the worst Jack Ryan book. **Summary**
The Good - The Idea
The Bad -Tom Clancy's execution of his idea
The Ugly -618 pages for a 350 page idea **Details**
THE GOOD - The plot is simple and an interesting idea. Jack Ryan early in his career as a CIA analyst is posted to London and brought into a situation involving the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II. It has cold war intrigue, spycraft and gives us the opportunity to see Ed and Mary Pat Foley at work early in their careers, as well as Admiral Greer and DDO Bob Ritter. At the same time Tom Clancy gets to write some historical fiction and speculate on the details behind the event including the roles of Brehznev, Andropov and Suslov. THE BAD - Of course, the villians are the KGB, communists and the assassin that a defector (the Rabbit) identifies. Also, as an aside, according to Dr. Cathy Ryan (who joins a hospital staff there) socialized medicine in the UK is so pathethic that one hopes never to need surgery while there. (This is the illustrative of the level of mind numbing detail in the book.) Of course, we are reminded at length how bad the communist economies were and how delusional were their leaders and while such reminders are probably worthwhile and do explain the thesis of the book, they continually interrupt the flow of the story. THE UGLY - The details of the torture methods used by Stalin and the KGB. The lack of fact checking and several editing mistakes, especially since Clancy's strength is his attention to detail. E.G. the assasin is twice misidentified as one of his previous victims with a similar name and even more incredibly the attempt on the Pope's life in actuality was made in 1981, yet in the book it occurs the year that the Orioles won the world series (1983) and when Cal Ripken was supposedly a rookie (1982). If you are going to write historical fiction rather than about events in some parallel universe, get your facts right. Jack Ryan fans will probably want to read this book despite its serious shortcomings, all others should wait for the movie which can keep the plot and action while getting rid of the extraneous material. Let's hope the apparent sequel, The Mask of The Red Death if the hints throughout this book mean anything, is better.
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