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Originally Posted by mcsluggo
I used to love Heinlein (back when I read), and if that book is the one I think it is... i hated it!!! (is it the one where there are a couple of guys that somehow get zapped to the future, and when they get there there has been a nuke war that has devistated the northern hemispheres and the southern hemispheres became totalitarian enslavers of the north (where everyone ended up 3 foot tall)?
I thought it was incredibly dull and every point was sooooo overplayed!!! granted, I probably read it when I was 15, but that book hit every point it had to make with 16 howitzers. And this is even relative to Heinlein's OTHER books, because lets face it, even though I used to really like the guy's writing overall (and prably still would, if I read any of it again) subtlety has never been the man's strong point. If anything he's has grabbed straight forward, non-subtlety as his centerpiece strategy and run with it... and even GIVEN that set-up this book was too over the top to be enjoyable to me. I don't remember for sure, but I actually think this book was the last book of his I read... and it kinda killed the "romance" for me.
It was almost like a Saturday Nite Live skit making fun of heinlein. All the characters were even MORE superman than usual, except the one token flaw he blatently tried to inject into each character to "humanize" them, but even in that case they tended to be flaws like "I just like broccoli too damn much...I can't help it, dammit all to hell!"
now... take this all with a grain of salt, because I think I read the book when I was AT MOST sixteen, and that would place it almost a quarter century ago...
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Hahaha... Farnham's Freehold is certainly an easy book to dislike, as Heinlein wrote it during his heavy-handed anti-government, bomb-shelter building survivalist phase, and it features some genuinely unlikable lead characters (Farnham is a jerk, his son is a whiner and a racist, Farnham's wife is lush who causes her son to be castrated, etc... ), and ridiculously uncomfortable themes (orientalist despotism, human breeding programs, cannibalism, incest, and the benefits of nudism), but perversely, I find that as part of it's charm. The book attempts to address some pretty big themes in a completely over the top Heinlein kind of way, but the book still reads like the shorter, pulpier works of his early career, rather than the often brilliant, but far longer winded works of his later career. All in all, I find the book to be something of a bombastic, amusing anachronism, and I had a good chuckle about the fact that it was one of the only semi-decent science fiction works that I could find in an airport bookstore the other week...
As for what I am currently reading... I just re-read Daniel Yergin's
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, and I just ordered a copy of George David Smith's
Wisdom from the Robber Barons: Enduring Business Lessons from Rockefeller, Morgan, and the First Industrialists that looked interesting on Amazon...