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Summary: Robert Heinlein is a master of the pen.
Review: This book was by far the best book i have ever read. Farnham's Freehold about a man and his dysfunctional family that is thrust forward in time by a thermonuclear blast. This story has no real meaning to it but maybe thats what makes it so much fun to read, it makes u think even if there isn't anything to think about.
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Summary: This is a great story for young and old.
Review: I would recommend this book for anyone who likes science fiction. It is filled with adventure, and it has many unexpected twist and turns. Robert Heinlein is a master of the excitement and this is one of his most interesting books. The first time I read this book I was all of 12. Now at the age of 19 I have read this book ragged. If you are lucky enough to get your hands on this book, enjoy. If not, keep trying you won't be dissapointed.
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Summary: Eugenic errors and racist stereotyping mar an OK tale.
Review: The novel is clever, like all of his work, but it is hard for me to appreciate... Heinlein's creation of a bizzare futuristc Black Muslim empire started out interestingly enough. It was a satire on historical cycles, monarchy, racial prejudice, revenge, and religious authority. But was just absurd and offensive when King Ponce's ultimate big bad secret was revealed...
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Summary: Eugenic errors and racist stereotyping mar an OK tale.
Review: Heinlein should have the scientific good sense to distinguish true Darwinism (i. e. the thery of evolution as understood by legitimate science) from the Wagnerian qausi-fascist pop myths about nature being a big Conan slug-fest in which the most brutal destuctive organism wins. It is his perogative to consider right-wing anarchists as "superior" in some sense but it has nothing to do with Darwin's observations about sucessful breeding. The novel is clever, like all of his work, but it is hard for me to appreciate a novelist who has turned himself into such an apologist for violence. For him violence is the nature of life. Peace lovers are fools. And yet it is the industries of peace that provide food and shelter and comfort. Neutral nations that use force only to defend their borders are more secure than vast empires. War only destroys life and makes it less likely that our children and grandchildren will survive.
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Summary: Farnham's freeehold the best?
Review: I really enjoyed this one! It appears to be like on of Heinlein's shorts with little to read inbetween the line's. But this has almost as much depth as Stranger or Cat who walks... This is most definatly a must read, both fun and incitefull.
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Summary: Please don't do this to yourself.
Review: After reading several of RAHs more prominent titles, this was a total let-down. About the first 3/4th of this book deals with the family attempting to set up a home and sustaining themselves, only to find out that none of that had anything to do with the plot. So if you want to wade through a pointless hundred and so pages, you will eventually get to the point. (spoiler!) And that involves the far-advanced race of humans thousands of years in the future. TOO BAD Heinlein didn't feel that this would have been a good focal point for the story, instead of hundreds of pages of stupid and pointless soap-opera dilemmas! ARGH
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Summary: Right wing, survivalist clap-trap
Review: Fairly typical Heinlein--juvenile, old man/young woman, rejection of any sort of community values except military discipline and obedience. Exciting plot marred by weird politics.
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Summary: Concise view of Heinlein attitudes (in a short book)
Review: Probably the best/shortest Heinlein. For someone just starting on RAH, it is a short & sweet introduction to the general concepts of the master. Fortunately, I started reading his works at an early age & appreciate his general view of women - so much more equality oriented than most any other author I can think of...too bad he's no longer w/us! Ten yrs on & we still miss him...
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Summary: Truly a work of art on post armageddon survival.
Review: I have been reading RAH's works since 1961. I was about nine years old when I picked up "Starship Troopers" at the library. Little did I know that this man would become a central figure in my literary world for years to come. From then on I was hooked on his books. When I had read all of the Heinlein books at the library, I began to prowl the local used paperback book stores looking for his SF treasures. I even rode a bus for two hours once to another city because one store had a copy of "Methuselah's Children". I was eleven then. My old man had a field day on my rear end when he found out about that one. It was worth it. Anyway, "Farnhams Freehold" is an excellent example of what a true survivor must do, whether they like it or not, to get by. I liked the book as a child because it was an adventure! I liked it as I grew older because of Hugh's tough no nonsense attitude when it came to everyone's well being. Hugh was smart eno! ugh to knuckle under while he was a slave so he could gain the trust of his captors. In todays world that is called sucking up. He had his reasons though and used this ploy to his, the twins and Barbara's advantage. I would recommend this book to anyone who isn't thin skinned and a whiner.
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Summary: Heinlein clothes his worries and sells them as entertainment
Review: The year is 1962, U.S./U.S.S.R. tensions are running high, and Hugh Farnham is all too aware of it. In the face of mocking by friends and family, Farnham has excavated and stocked a bomb shelter in the back yard of his Colorado mountain home. On the night in which the story opens, Hugh has been using a transistor radio with an earphone to listen to ominous news items out of the Kremlin as he plays bridge with his son, daughter, and daughter's friend. Their game is interrupted by a red alert, and Hugh, the young people, Hugh's wife and his black servant race toward the shelter. As they seal themselves in, thermonuclear weapons buffet them. With the shelter's temperature rising rapidly, his wife in an alcoholic stupor and everyone else sleeping under sedation, Hugh turns to Barbara, his daughter's friend, for a little comfort, but their lovemaking is punctuated by a direct hit from an H-bomb. One would think that the story would end right there, but it does not. Farnham and company survive and emerge, strangely enough, into a pristine wilderness. Heinlein treats us to one more of his well-done survival stories, detailing how the Farnhams stake their claim and improve it by living off the land and farming with the supplies that Farnham has so wisely stocked the shelter with; but that is not the whole of the story; it also deals with questions of marital strife, child rearing, personal integrity, competency, racial relations (most definitely that) and even slavery and cannibalism. <i>Farnham's Freehold</i> might have been told at novella length, but Heinlein deals with quite a few issues here, and fleshes out the post-nuclear wilderness episode in great detail. He takes the time to write movingly of several events and, in the latter third of the book, he describes a whole new society radically different from our own. It bears mention that Heinlein and his wife lived in Colorado Springs at ! the time and also maintained a bomb shelter under their mountainside home. During the early 1960s, the threat of nuclear war was especially evident, and government brinksmanship and civil defense loomed large in the public mind: Conelrad, public shelters, `duck and cover,' the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev saying, "We will bury you." True to form, Heinlein holds forth in <i>Farnham's Freehold</i> on issues of consuming importance to him, cleverly clothing it all in fine entertainment.
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