SPIDER ROBINSON: THE CRAZY YEARS. And how to judge a book by the cover.
I think sales for this tome were not good. The cover is...well...it sucks. If I were to have gotten a hold of this title and wanted a cover done up for it, I would have gone to Mad Magazine, asked an artist or two, "Can you make this guy look like Alfred E. Neuman?" and suggest he be viewed as holding up a book titled THE CRAZY YEARS with him on the cover holding up a book, etc....

But this cover is just dumb. I almost didn't buy this one, looking at it and feeling the whole inane view just making me wish I could find one where the cover had been torn off, or heavily inked over so I wouldn't need to look at it.

The title is by way of Robert A. Heinlein, by way of his future history sequence, which has a small section in it, largely unwritten, called "the crazy years", by which RAH meant a schism and showdown between science and art and religion and society needs and wants and confrontations with commerce and requirement. I don't think he meant for the writer he loaned this title to, would enable him to appear trussed up in a straight jacket with a dull hint of stupid on his face enabling the book to bomb in the marketplace, or throw off the reader in the wrong direction about the content of the book.

What's worse is the writer involved ought to know better. I've had my say. Deal with it.