The book consists of Heinlein’s letters. There are addressed mainly to his agent, and cover various subjects, among others editorial corrections and mild censorship of his early juveniles. It seems the editors of juvenile books were a bit paranoid at that time – and some very strange things were considered to be too raunchy. Some of the letters are very interesting, and some aren’t interesting at all, sometimes it is hard see why just those one were selected, or why those parts of the longer letters were selected. Heinlein spends a lot of time bitching about time spend on fans coming to visit him and other things which took time from writing. Understandable, but if it was so irritating, why pay any attention to them?
The letters are ordered by subject matter, which isn’t very good idea in my opinion. Chronological order would have much better and logical, and the result would have resembled more autobiography which he didn’t do. He did had plans for such a book, and it was supposed to be called “Grumbles from the Grave”, we got this instead - which is a great pity.
325 pp.
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