Reviews
If any work of fiction will earn Robert Heinlein a permanent place on the collective bookshelf, it is going to be Stranger in a Strange Land, for the impact it has made on American society. If a person has not managed to read Strangerby now, then he has at least absorbed a bit of it osmotically, for it flows throughout our cultural consciousness. Perhaps least of all, it anticipated Nancy Reagan's reliance on astrology and spawned the water bed and the neologism 'grok,' (Heinlein's Martian verb for a thorough understanding), though 'grok' would never have taken hold, had the young rebels of the 1960s not discovered Stranger as their counterculture bible. Some went even further and formed 'nests' and churches based on what they found in Stranger; perhaps the most famous instance...