Rating:  Summary: Everything is wrong with this book Review: In this book, Jack Ryan is sent to work with British intelligence services and moves to England with his wife and children. Here is where Tom Clancy gets practically every single thing he writes about England wrong and it is terribly insulting. According to him, all English people use words such as "old boy", "indeed", "quite" to name but a few constantly. If he spent one single day in the UK he would realise that this is not the case. The average person in England does not employ a nanny as implied in the book. English people do not go to the pub for beer every single lunchtime. This book is set in 1981 and Jack Ryan uses terminal 4 in Heathrow for all his travels. Terminal 4 did not come into being until 1986. Worst of all, there is an episode where surgeons abandon an operation to go to a pub for a boozy lunch and leave a patient on an operating table. This again is implied as being quite normal. This is not nor ever has been acceptable in British medicine and to have this in this book is quite shocking. Also, Cathy Ryan moans on about the British health system and how people have to wait for a year for a procedure whereas in the US they can pay and get treatment instantly. Yes in England if you want your treatment for free you have to wait - however like the US, if you have the money you can pay and have instant treatment - another fact Mr Clancy didn't bother to check out.I only know whats wrong with the episodes in England - god only knows what facts he has wrong about Russia etc as I dodn't have enough knowledge to know the difference, Mr Clancy is extremely insulting to other nations. In other books he has Japan making war in cahoots with India. If I were Japanese or Indian I would be insulted. Yes you can say that this is fiction, but people are human and will be insulted. If a book were written which says the same derogatory things about the US, I'm sure it would be banned in a Micheal Moore style. Clancy does not seem to get out much. He needs to open his eyes and visit some of these places he talks about.
Rating:  Summary: College Student lover of Jack Ryan series Review: First things first. While I do enjoy the huge war epics that Clancy has written, I am much more a fan of his intellectual small-scale 'warfare' novels. I agree with many reviewers on here that the book has some extraneous fluff. However, given the number of books and plots of them that Clancy has written, the options he has left limits him in plots of new books. Red Rabbit is a slow thinker-thriller that is average compared to other Clancy books and pretty good compared to other authors of the same genre. Red Rabbit takes you through the daily KGB activities and functions and gives you an idea of British intelligence services. While everyone knew what was going to happen at the end, it was fun to see how they got there. What keeps you in this book is Ed and Mary Pat. Though barely mentioned in Teeth of the Tiger, they ought to be a central role in the book after Teeth/Tiger. All in all, not a bad book if you enjoy the intricacies of espionage.
Rating:  Summary: Rabbit Droppings Review: Not Clancy's best effort. Not even close. What has really irked me while reading the last few novels is his ending every other paragraph with a question. Shouldn't he? Wouldn't it? Can it? It's so blatently distracting that it has me focusing more on that than on the plot. I really expected more out of this book. It was a great opportunity to flesh out the early years of the Clancy characters we've all grown so fond of through the years. I guess when an author sets such high standards, it's difficult to maintain that level of excellence every time out. Still, the antics of Mary Pat Foley are always a guilty pleasure and any book with Jack Ryan in it is bound to hold some interest.
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.
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