Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Atlas Shrugged
Book Review: 5-stars = producer, 1-star = looter.
Summary: 5 Stars
I highly recommend this book for anyone who believes in the power of the individual. Ayn Rand paints socialism in vivid color. The looters of the world feel a sense of entitlement, they believe they are "owed" the hard work of others.Book Review: :)
Summary: 5 Stars
WOW!! :) The book was in PERFECT condition....I almost feel bad opeing it up to read it...BUT I HAVE to!! It's such a GR8 novel!!Book Review: A "must read" book.
Summary: 5 Stars
It is an excelent novel following the line of thinking of Ortega y Gasset's "La rebelion de las masas", and Jose Ingenieros's "El Hombre Mediocre".
If you think that is fictional, come to live to Argentina. This book is a chronology of what's been going on here the last years.
Book Review: A "novel" approach to philosophy.
Summary: 2 Stars
ATLAS SHRUGGED is undoubtedly an interesting and thought-provoking novel. But unfortunately for Rand and her seemingly deathless (and hydra-headed) Admiration Society, there is more to doing sound philosophy (including political and economic theory) than writing a big long novel and then peppering a series of sloppily-reasoned short essays with quotations from it.
The basic problem, of course, is that a novel is _fiction_. The fact that Rand can write a story in which something or other happens is evidence only of the vividness of her imagination, no matter how plausible she makes it sound in the artificial world of her novel. And in this case, the fiction in question is not without deep problems of its own.
Other reviewers, including me, have called attention to the fact that Rand basically puts most of the world to death in this grandiose fantasy of hers, ultimately on the "argument" that some human beings aren't _really_ human after all. And other reviewers, including me, have called attention to the fact that outside of "Galt's Gulch," capitalism is _not_ dependent solely on the mighty creative efforts of a handful of geniuses but primarily on a vast network of cooperating human beings, pretty much any two or three of whom working together could out-survive a lone John Galt who is wholly dependent on his own resources.
The free market _does_ (sometimes) reward (some types of) genius, of course, but primarily it rewards the willingness to engage in peaceful commerce even with relative strangers and the ability to provide those strangers with stuff they want in exchange for stuff they're willing to part with. A supergenius who was, like Howard Roark, "born without the ability to consider other people" would find himself either undergoing a serious attitude adjustment or else starving to death while he tried to find "other people" willing to let him exercise his sublime and incomparable genius on _their_ construction projects. (And we might well wonder how someone described in such clearly narcissistic terms could design buildings suitable for human habitation at all, let alone as wonderfully adapted to their occupants' needs as Rand says Roark's buildings are.)
And just for fun, I'll add that a real-life Dagny Taggart would be damned lucky if she didn't get pregnant several times during the course of her bedroom escapades with metallurgist/adulterer Hank Rearden while she lived out Rand's ideal of "romantic love." (I hope Rand herself was so lucky. But in light of her ill-reasoned views on abortion, one has to wonder.) She'd be even luckier if a man who was willing to cheat on his wife was also willing to support any children he happened to father in the process. (But on Rand Planet, it's Dagny who tosses Hank over for John Galt. And guess what: Hank doesn't mind. Don't try this at home.)
At any rate, Rand's tendentious fiction is hardly within tomato-tossing distance of the real free market or its genuinely philosophical defenses. Rand's bizarre and ultimately subjectivist ethic doesn't even permit us to say that, ceteris paribus, it would be _good_ if everyone had sufficient food, housing, medical care, and so forth; that, on her terms, would be "intrinsicism."
The fact that capitalism accomplishes these aims in as economically efficient a manner as will ever be possible on earth, and that it does so without violating the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people who do the accomplishing, is not a fact one will learn from Rand. Oh, she mentions it once in a while, but she can't present any sound arguments for it -- and, really, she doesn't even think it's all that important.
She acknowledges that there are ultimately no actual _conflicts_ of interest among "rational" people, but that our interests are, or can be, positively _coherent_ seems to have escaped her altogether. This latter is one of those facts that falls by the wayside owing to her impoverished view of "reason" -- which, on her kindergarten-level understanding, is satisfied by merely "noncontradictory identification." (Strictly construed, this view should have committed her to some form of logical atomism. Be that is it may, no intelligence worthy of the name is satisfied by the sheer absence of contradiction.)
For the arguments that Rand couldn't be bothered to offer, one has to go to a _real_ economist like Ludwig von Mises -- who, despite his high volume of scholarly output, didn't write even one single novel during his entire career. And what a tremendous loss that is -- not.
Book Review: A 500-page book (max) blown up to 1,000 pages
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is 1,000 pages long, and as you read it you can't help but think that a decent editor could have trimmed 400 pages with ease. 50 pages (or more) of the book are devoted to "mocking" and "contemptuous" smiles, and no character gives another a glance without conveying paragraphs of unspoken (but unfortunately not unwritten) meaning.The entire "Atlas Shrugged" concept, the backbone of the plot, is very intriguing and I suspect this is why so many people are drawn to give the book a chance. The book begins strongly, which actually makes it harder to bear when you see the promising plot degenerate into a series of mind-numbingly redundant dialogues in a world that is so black-or-white that you are unable to continue suspending your disbelief and realize you are not reading a story of the planet Earth, but of some distant planet in the Randoverse where different rules apply.
If you love to read, steer clear -- you'll be skipping pages by the tens with full confidence that you're missing nothing you haven't read a dozen times already. Having finished the book, my primary reaction is surprise -- I am surprised at how such a bad book could enjoy the sort of reputation it seems to have.