The Fountainhead (Centennial Edition Hardcover) by Ayn Rand Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fountainhead (Centennial Edition Hardcover)
Book Review: Young minds full of mush
Summary: 4 Stars
The Fountainhead is a fine novel. I loved the plot and I even enjoyed the characters (although they exhibit an amount of emotional repression that is extraordinary). The problem with The Fountainhead is that it is intended to seduce its target audience (high school and college age kids) to embrace right wing politics. Kids who read The Fountainhead have seldom ever read or have a clear understanding of politics, philosophy, and sociology. After reading The Fountainhead kids will come away parroting Ayn Rand's polemics. Kids who read The Fountainhead remind me of kids who used to study the works of Karl Marx in the 60s and 70s: they put down the book thinking they now have all the answers to life. Most kids abandon objectivism (like kids in the 60s and 70s abandoned socialism) after they experience life. But, oh, how annoying they can be until then! The book still wields a cult-like trance with the young which is why The Fountainhead will always remain (after the Bible) the book most kids claim changed their lives. Happy reading!Book Review: More two-dimensional than the paper it's printed on.
Summary: 1 Stars
If _The Fountainhead_ had been written as an exposition of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy in non-fictional form, its message would be vastly more palatable today. An appreciation of this book is independent of whether the reader agrees with Rand's assessment of the highest goals to which humanity can strive. Unfortunately, by reading it one is forced to wade through a morass of patently contrived situations, involving characters so reminiscent of automata that one continually expects them to be unmasked by the sudden confession of the evil genius who programmed them. Alas, no such relief appears. By the time the denoument is reached _The Fountainhead_ requires the willing suspension not only of disbelief but of disgust.
Perhaps it was the author's hope that sympathy toward other persons should be eliminated as an unethical, insufficiently selfish impulse. If so, the characterization in this novel will serve as a useful exercise in the quashing of benevolence. Any reader who feels for Howard Roark or Dominique Francon may well benefit from a modicum of psychological attention.
Book Review: This book is about life.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book changed my life, I don't think the same way I did, I don't see things like I did before. I thought I was happy, I thought it was a good life. This book changed it all. I've learned to say I, this is how I changed. I gave nine because I'm currently reading Atlas Shrugged and I seems even better.Book Review: the truth
Summary: 3 Stars
c'mon, people. the fountainhead is only about two things : sex and architecture. if you think you read any more into it, you need to set the book down and go play ball.Book Review: Objectivism's "Pilgrim's Progress"
Summary: 1 Stars
I am one of the high-school students to whom this book is so emphatically recommended. I read this book for the purpose of entering the Ayn Rand Foundation scholarship contest, and it was only discipline (and need for the money for college) that kept me at it. If you're going to write a novel, write a novel. Don't write a cheap allegory of your ideas that banters ON and ON and ON. I find it ironic that Ms. Rand repeatedly touted the simplicity and efficiency of Roark's work, yet said in 700-some pages what could have been said in 100 or less. I agree with thinking for yourself, but after a session of reading The Fountainhead, I was lucky if I could think at all. I would liken it to being hit in the head with a sledgehammer of ideas. While some were worthy, the intensity of their repetition defeated the enitire purpose. And if objectivism and individualism is the goal, by elevating Ayn Rand to the status of a godess and her philosophies to the gospel, her dedicated followers are defying everything she tried to teach. Smells like hypocrisy to me.