Rating: 
Summary: The other side of Heinlein
Review: This is the side of Heinlein that's not really showcased in his more traditional hard sf: Heinlein the mystic, as in some of his other early work like Assignment in Eternity, etc. This stuff should maybe be classified as horror. The title story is classical horror that stays with you; All You Zombies is an all-time classic time-travel story, but very disturbing. Them is even more disturbing - Stephen King never wrote a more elegant short-short. The sweetest story is The Man Who Traveled in Elephants - which is about death. Crooked House reads like a classical math-problem sf story - but what do they see out the window? Very, very interesting set of stories: a potential revelation for fans of the hard-sf Heinlein. You can really see the seeds that would later sprout into Stranger in a Strange Land and Job.
Rating: 
Summary: Heinlein's best short fiction
Review: Why in the world did they let this gem go out of print?Heinlein was often at his best in his shorter works, and each of thestories in it is a matserpiece of the genre. The ideas are totallyoriginal, the writing is spare and sharp, and the dialog is crisp and to the point. No sci-fi jargon, no talk of fusion drives and orbital mechanics.The title story, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", begins with a simple premise- a man comes to a private eye and asks him to figurie out what he does all day. He can't remember anything of the day's events, and worries that the material he finds under his fingernails might be blood. It isn't; it's dirt, but something infintely more bizarre is waiting to be discovered. "He Built A Crooked House" is one of the wittiest, most imaginative short stories I've ever come across. An architect designs a modern house meant to resemble a three-dimensional projection of a hypercube, but when he and his client arrive after an earthquake, something quite odd has happened to the house. END
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