Rating: 
Summary: Liberal Revolution
Review: For those of you willing to hatch a revolution against conservative governments working you too hard and paying you too little, this is your book. Learn to plot you own liberal revolution and improve your chances of success! Hurl large moon rocks at Earth if they won't accept your demands!I found this book to be more accomplished than "Stranger in a Strange Land" in almost every way imaginable. While there are some dated concepts, especially with regard to gender relations, the plotting of this book and its in-depth study of other concepts more than makes up its shortcomings. This is a wonderful novel of political ideals and intrigue. It explores environmental concepts of living at peace (and maintaining equilibrium) with your surroundings, the potentially destabilizing impact of globalization, and the eventualities of pure capitalism. Read this book. You will not be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic piece of genre literature
Review: This novel is one of the greatest science fiction works of all time. A loose parallel of several historical revolutions, it chronicals the revolt of a lunar penal colony. With hard work, dedicated planning, and a super-intelligent, self-aware computer, three lunar inhabitants form a rebellion. A brilliant combination of action, excellent story-telling, and good science make this a fantastic novel. The picture he draws of the lunar culture is both familiar and different, making it a believable result of the future history described in the book. I find myself re-reading this book several times a year. I would have to rate this one of my two favorite novels of all time. If you haven't read this, and enjoy being entertained give The moon is a harsh mistress a chance.
Rating:
Summary: An Unforgetable classic
Review: Trying to review this novel is like trying to violate Godel's theorem. How can you encompass a complete world in a short review? The characters are compelling, enduring, and valiant. The action, while perhaps unlikely, is believable by anyone who has witnessed the political and moral blunders of the twentieth Century. When read with another Heinlein masterwork, Revolt in 2100, this novel presents an uncanny manual for revolution in the media age. Younger readers may have difficulty with the 20th century context, but this is a novel which will be remembered in Science Fiction circles with War of the Worlds and From the Earth to the Moon.
Rating:
Summary: A good Story
Review: If you liked the book you will love this audio presentation.
Rating: 
Summary: Not even funny once.
Review: I only read about 100 pages of this book, so I'm sure I didn't get to the good part, but it just wasn't too bright of Heinlein to put the bad part all through the first 100 pages. I simply ran out of patience. The bad part is the supposed futuristic prose style of the narrative. I guess he was trying to pare down the language by removing ambiguous "it"s and "there"s from the speach of the characters. Sort of like if I said, "It's raining." Well, since you have know idea what the "It" is in this sentance, you could well ask, "What's raining". Or I could say, "There's a man I want you to meet." You could say "Where's a man you want me to meet?" Heinlein removes these confusing and unnecessary words from the English language and yields sentances like, "Is raining." or "Is a man I want you to meet." There. Isn't that better? No. So I ask, "Is helpful to alter the language like this to help demonstrate that will be changes in way we communicate in future?" Well, Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" is proof enough that this kind of technique can work wonders. That book however seemed to be written by a man who could actually imagine his characters speaking in such a whacked-out manner. This book's "inventive" prose could've been "invented" by a word processor. Or a bottle of white out. Is Heinlein saying that in the future we will have to communicate with computers so regularly that we will begin to think like them? If so, why does he use silly colloquialisms like "the Yankees finished in the cellar" which were basically dead at the time he wrote this? Is it to show that some things never change? Cute. But not funny. Not even funny once. Then there's all this long-winded "character development" wasted on characters that have less substance than the cast of Scooby Doo. The Professor (we call him Prof), The able bodied male Manuel O'Kelly (we call him Man), the brains of the operation (in this case a supercomputer called MIKE) and the utterly useless but somehow ubiquitous hot chick with the ridiculous name of Wyoming Knott (just don't call her Why Not?). Get it? It's stupid!... I hate this book more the more I think about it.
By the way, the worst thing about all Heinlein is his relentless sexism. He repeatedly creates weak female characters, then pokes at their faults, then forgives them for having something like good intentions (just feeble minds and bodies). From what I hear, this is a guy who spent a lot of his life alone in the mountains. There really is something of the egocentric-misogynist-hermit archetype that is associated with right-winger fanatics and libertarians in Heinlein. Maybe that's why this book is popular with libertarians! Anyway, this book sucks. Stranger in a Strange Land was much better. So was Starship Troopers for that matter. They both had the same sad sexism and pretentiousness, but had more... heart.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: Some people claim this book is sugar coated. The enemies are one dimensional and easily conquered. I'll concede that's true, to an extent. What makes the book shine, however, are the characters. Heinlein's technical and scientific descriptions show the heavy research that went into crafting this book. Radiation storms, catapults, etc. Sure, a giant immobile computer is a bit dated, but who cares? It's all about suspension of disbelief. If you're going to accept a colony on the moon and a man with 7 detachable arms, accept Mike, the computer. Speaking of Mike..absolutely the most endearing artificial intelligence character I have ever come across. I was nearly in tears at the novel's conclusion (Man . . . Man my best friend . . . ). Mannie turns from a simple mechanic out to cheat Authority to a full blown leader. Prof is endearing and vicious at the same time. Stuart LaJoie, although somewhat underdeveloped, serves to amuse and delight. A fascinating tale of rebellion, potentially realistic space travel, and a wonderful talking computer. One of Heinlein's best.
Rating:
Summary: If Heinlein's name is on the cover, just buy it!
Review: In the classic Hugo Award-winning book, a one-armed computer technician, a radical blonde bombshell, an aging academic, and a sentient all-knowing computer lead the lunar population in a revolution against Earth's colonial rule. This book details Cell group organisation, and the basic mechanics of winning a revolution, set in a Science Fiction background. Tom Clancy has said of Robert A. Heinlein, "We proceed down the path marked by his ideas. He shows us where the future is." Nowhere is this more true than in Heinlein's gripping tale of revolution on the moon in 2076, where "Loonies" are kept poor and oppressed by an Earth-based Authority that turns huge profits at their expense. A small band of dissidents, including a one-armed computer jock, a radical young woman, a past-his-prime academic and a nearly omnipotent computer named Mike, ignite the fires of revolution despite the near certainty of failure and death.
Rating: 
Summary: Like Mike
Review: In many ways, this book has something for everybody. My wife assigned HARSH MISTRESS as the final reading to a class studying American revolutions. She finds the connections to American history interesting. Some are explicit, such as the Professor's own lectures on the importance of timing and foreign distraction in creating your own revolution. She also liked the historically appropriate "complainant pays" criminal justice system, and the penal colony environment. For me, there was Mike. Mike represented the ahistorical link. American revolutionaries never really had their own Mike, the intelligent computer. Though depicted largely as a cobbled-together mainframe that just happened to stumble on the necessary capacity for sentience, Mike provides the means for looking at more contemporary revolution issues. For instance, his interference represents the imperfect communications monitoring that allows cell-structured groups to operate today. He also brings to mind the financing required to operate a disbursed and secretive group. It's cheaper to run than the US Military, but it still requires some seed money. I'll assume that, >whoah!<, thinking computers were not even that amazing an idea back when Heinlein envisioned this book, though apparently personal computing was. That is kind of the quaint charm of the story, the sense that computers were this awe-inspiring thing that only a handful of technicians could understand. Eventually, interesting as Mike's initial explorations into human interaction are, he and the Professor jointly morph into the Heinleinian sidekick, while Manuel is your basic Heinlein First Person, albeit with neat-o changing arms and funky accent (this guy needs an action-figure toy). There's no point in remembering the name of The Blonde, because, well, the other "quaint" aspect of this book is how much of a non-entity she is. Basically, MISTRESS is a book of ideas. That the ideas are so interesting is what makes it seem like the author had a fun time writing it. The plot is uneven, the characters so-so, and the conflict rigged with pushover antagonists. This book has become part of the libertarian freak flag because it has interesting things to say about justice, coercion, and economy, many of which today's would-be libertarians would do well to remember.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: It is a shame that sci-fi is so easily written off by many people as geek fodder. This book has much in common with 1984 in that it has such an insightful view into how politics, and society itself for that matter, works. 1984 is considered by many to be a classic, but if you use the standard definition of sci-fi then it could be thrown in there, and if nobody had taken the time to see past the fact that the book takes place in the future, it easily could have been tossed aside like a cheap pulp novel and we wouldn't have learned so much from it. 1984 teaches us the mechanics of totalitarianism. Heinlein in this book shows us the mechanics of revolution against totalitarianism, and the view is slightly frightening. The tactics that must be resorted to in order to create a stable society based on individual freedom are not as idealistic as the end result. The main characters use schemes almost as treacherous as those used by people that create and maintain authoritarian governments. It is only because we can see inside their secret meetings, and for that matter their heads, that we know their motives are pure and we want them to succeed. However it makes it clear how both sides use propaganda and the wills of the people to accomplish their ends, and how revolutions can go wrong or only lead to equally as bad or worse governments if the people involved aren't honest.
Overall I would say that the information in this book is indispensable. Especially if you want to understand how politics really works, at the back room level, and how the rest is propaganda and bureaucracy. Anyone that liked 1984 will probably like this book, but with all due respect to George Orwell I would have to say that this one has a better plot and is more fun to read even if you're not as interested in the politics.
Rating: 
Summary: An OK book
Review: First of all, this is not even close to being a "Stranger in a Strange Land" ou a "Starship Troopers". It's basically just a story about the Moon (now a place where they send prisioners) and its fight for freedom from Earth. To me, the book seemed like a plane that would run around the airport tracks but would refuse to actually take off. The characters and the family structures that Mr. Heinlein thought up were really interesting and the chatacters really come alive. But the story, unfortunately, is somewhat lacking.
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