We the Living
by Ayn Rand
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ayn RandIntroduction: Leonard Peikoff
Edition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-01-01
ISBN: 0451187849
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Signet
Book Reviews of We the Living
Book Review: "You cannot enslave man's mind. You can only destroy it."
Summary: 5 Stars
"What's a citizen? Only a brick and of no use unless cemented to other bricks just like it"? As one character lectures another herein: "why do you think you are entitled to your own thoughts...against those of the majority of the Collective?" After all, as a Bolshevik explains, "...no external enemy...is as dangerous to us as the internal enemy of dissension within our own ranks. Hence we read this on the book's jacket: "We the Living demonstrates the supreme value of a human life and the evil of those who claim the right to sacrifice it." There's your life. You begin it feeling that it's something so precious & rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure." But "one man means nothing in the face of the mighty Proletarian Collective," the Bolsheviks counter. In such an environment, Kira, the heroine of this 1936 novel (Ayn Rand's first) subsequently concludes: "Nothing matters. We mustn't think. We mustn't think at all." To a Bolshevik she charges, "you came and forbade life [as in freedom of choice] to the living." "You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls---and you told them what it had to be;" "telling men "what they must live for." This after we see how a number of characters lose their jobs, or get thrown out of university "for trying to think" for themselves. This is life in the Soviet Union as personally experienced by Ayn Rand (a nom de plume the Russian author invented to protect family members still living in Leningrad at the time). She saw firsthand how Bolshevism went about putting down new rules, fashioning a state that took "your honor, your life and your freedom." And while this isn't Ms. Rand's life story, it is, as the author states in the introduction, a sort of autobiography, in the intellectual sense; having instilled Kira with the author's "ideas, her convictions, her values." And while the "plot is invented," the author admits, "the background is not." And the "Sovietness" of said background is not the paramount issue herein either, but the notion that, notwithstanding any utopian rhetoric, "you cannot enslave man's mind. "You can only destroy it." In a collectivist society, "what are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own." Ms. Rand's work is, in short, a powerfully written expose of collectivist mentalities; a warning that "you cannot castigate life "in order to perpetuate it." PS: There's an Italian-made film, very faithfull to this book---the only film ever made based on this novel---which is well worth viewing. It's available from Amazon (or perhaps through your local library). (06May) Cheers!
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