Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
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Book Reviews of Atlas Shrugged
Book Review: Bombastic but Rewarding
Summary: 4 Stars
First of all, let me say that this is a really long book...too long. I don't see any reason it should be almost 1,100 pages in just about the smallest print possible to comprehend. Having said that, it is a rewarding book, full of insight, perspective, and prescience. I never thought of how flawed a Communist/Socialist system could be until I read this book. Rand dissects the greed, deceit, and opportunism behind a deceptive government system in a way I have never seen before. She has an uncomprimising yet understandable vision that is reflected from her own horrific experiences in a Communist hell, where she barely escaped and almost starved. Her rage against such a system is justified and she channels it into a compelling story in Atlas Shrugged.
This book has transformed the way many college students think, especially in terms of how advantageous a capitalist society can be. In Rand's view, only selfish motives can ultimately bring about progress and hence, the achievements that will most benefit humanity. Her views have merit, too. Would we really be motivated to undertake as many of the grueling endeavors we do without motivations that are inherently selfish, namely money and ownership? Maybe a handful of us are innately altruistic, but the majority of us are not, and if left to depend on altruism alone, we would surely perish.
Philosophical ruminations aside, there is a lot to dislike about this book as well. While Rand's prose captures images and sensations like few other authors have, this is somewhat tempered by her absolute need to hammer home a message that is well-established within the early parts of the book. She makes it clear that she believes socialism to be the root of all evil from the beginning, yet she feels the need to keep pounding away at the reader's brain in case we missed it the first fifty times or so that she very explicitly said it. Subtlety is not this book's strength, and its hardheadedness wears on the reader. Granted this was written during a time of anti-Communist sentiment, but Rand doesn't trust her readers to make their own judgements and winds up coming off as elitist herself, not to mention condescending.
The characters, while often fascinating, frequently and irritatingly break into philosophical discourses practically every page. Some of these discussions and arguments are really thought-provoking, but too often, it's obtrusive and gets in the way of creating well-rounded and human characters. Almost none of them have layers; almost all of them are either completely virtuous or completely evil. She writes a novel that achieves greatness in many respects, especially in plotting and substance, but is severly lacking in others, namely her inability (or lack of restraint) to create characters with flaws as well as values.
Rand creates a terrifying and, for its day, timely environment where the world is on the brink of collapse because of people's unwillingly to rely on each other and their gullibility to a system of empty promises. She evokes many emotions with her writing, which is quite strong overall. If it weren't so didactic, I'd be willing to award this book the full five stars, but as it is, it's a worthwhile read. It's bloated and overlong, but there's a reason it's a seminal classic. Her philosophy is a little extreme and many certainly won't fully agree with it, but at least she's got one and isn't afraid to imbue her work with it, which is more than can be said for a lot of other books out there.
Book Review: Utopianism and childhood fairy tale for Yuppiedom and Wall St.
Summary: 1 Stars
'"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values..."
Sorry Rand. Your pathetic attempt at philosophy is nothing but a complete absurdity and ocn-job from a Russian exile who gave us the likes of Greenspan, corporate crimes, and inside mortgage industry corruption that made my money earned from my productivity go up in smoke, thirty thousand dollars and counting.
You speak of "productiveness" yet know nothing of Thorstein Veblen's Leisure Class and inherited fortunes of families that DO NOT WORK. The Walmarts are a leisure class. Thier fortunes, as with any American fortune was made by exploitation, violation of rule of law, and yes, using child labor in the late nineteenth century. Not one word about wages, because in your fairy tale all thw workers are happy and paid well enough to make a living?
Well, of course you wouldnt know of our fight for the 8 hour workday Ayn. Of course you immigrated to America AFTER the Ludlow Massacre, Pullman Railroad strike of 1877, and death of Joe Hill; kidnapped and murdered as a righteous martyr for workers. Work and let me be perfectly clear on this because it is the absolutely irrefutable fact of the materialist conception of history, that being human L-A-B-O-R.
Without it we have no civilization, no food, no agriculture, no Egypytian pyramids or Roman aqueducts. Wage slavery or ancient slavery, in the end, elites in priest costumes or business suits will be lying to and duping the masses until everything crumbles into dust.
Please Ayn, send all your "brillant" inventors and industrialists who escape to Utopia in the end without paying taxes, who would have ever thought you were writing about metaphorical offshore coporate tax havens that deprive our society of more capital to build safer bridges and better hostitals?
Your ethical corporate businessmean are the bankers who pulled an inside job and cost us dearly, for generations, why oh why couldnt they have just escaped to your silly Utopia before infecting us with diseased filth and human folly worthy of a Nero or Caligula, who were ironically, FAR more entertaining as the last of the Judeo-Claudio ruling dynasty?
Your system is broken. It is a lie. Your greed and tax-dodging is a sick nightmare I have to live with everytime I step outside and breath in the air of this stupified, childishly bankrupt society on the path to nowhere Ms. Rand, because in your hell, everyone who isnt an industrialist, inventor, architect, business man, etc is expendable and disposable.
Everyone will die and perish of hunger in the Valley of happiness you created because with no worker scum to exploit, lay off, rip-off, poison, expose to radiation, injure, maim, and kill on the worksite, lie to, sexually harrass, disccrimate against, etc, no one will be left.
Herbert Spencer's Survival of the Fittest bears fruit at last and they're all dead.
Charles Darwin's Struggle for Existence isnt a struggle for the one percent born into all the stolen wealth and property at the barrel of a gun for generations, rule of Force rules the land, and nobody struggles born into billions.
Book Review: In the name of the best within us
Summary: 4 Stars
This is not an easy book for me to review. Despite its verbosity, repetitiveness, and simplification, Atlas Shrugged made me think about the nature of humanity - and the struggle for happiness - in a new and unique way, and for that it should be applauded. It argues for a standard of personal morality based on hard work and ones word, and it's one that I fully agree with. Furthermore, the book provides a window into the thinking of a lot of the "James Taggart's" that I see where I live (in Los Angeles), which is invaluable. Not many books make me sit down and think and for that I am giving it a high rating.
On to the objections:
1. Everything is projected in abject black and white - either you're on the side of laissez-faire capitalism, or you're a degenerate looter and moocher. There isn't anything portrayed that's in between - Ayn Rand thinks that you "can't have your cake and eat it too," but this is a fundamental straw man argument and doesn't reflect objective reality. There are plenty of honest, hardworking businessmen and women who understand the nature of the society in which they live, and use the much-despised "pull" to secure their accomplishments - without betraying themselves or their values.
2. Ignoring the dangers of monopoly. If a company performs its actions and achieves its objectives better than everyone else, driving them out of business, I have no problem with it. But what inevitably happens without some governmental restrictions on monopoly is stagnation and price increases, suppressing of new competition through local price cutting below cost, contracts with competitors in restraint of trade, and the like. See Standard Oil as a historical example.
3. Unrealistic character dialogue. Dagny, Rearden, Anconia, and Galt seem incapable of having a regular, everyday conversation - everything revolves around finding out the truth of objectivism and, once finding it, exorting the wonders of it. This can be straining; there's a lot of dialogue in this 1000+ page book and you'll sit there wishing they talked about other things from time to time.
4. Repetitiveness: I will admit that when Dagny left Galt's Gulch, around page 800, I skimmed the rest of the book. At this point Rand had demonstrated what she wanted to accomplish and most of the stuff past here was highly repetitive. Galt's 50 page speech was a prime example of this. Interestingly the buddy who let me borrow this book also had starting skimming where I had.
5. Sex bordering on rape. This is a theme in The Fountainhead as well and such fetishtic acts - occuring over and over - seem a little disturbing.
Ultimately, people need to be free to accomplish and succeed - and there is no doubt that a capitalistic society is more productive than any other kind, and that the more socialist it gets, the worse off it is -- but I remain unconvinced that complete laissez-faire capitalism is the answer. There needs to be taxes to pay for public roads, for the military, for police and the fire department, and for enforcing limited governmental regulations. I'm also in favor of a very limited social safety net - i.e. unemployment benefits - tied strongly toward the unemployed finding new jobs in a short time frame. However, we've gone far, far beyond these things - Europe today is in a terrible state, slowly collapsing under itself, and unfortunately, the U.S. is slowly following in its footsteps.
Book Review: High-action adventue novel about love of life!
Summary: 5 Stars
If you like an action novel with adult-size, believable heroes living in the same world you do and, at the same time, the kind of book that'll make you re-think every idea you've ever heard or lived your life by, you'll love Atlas Shrugged..
In it, you'll meet Dagny Taggart, a woman who runs a continental railroad against the resistance of her incompetent and politically-connected brother. You'll meet Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian D'Anconia, the latest heir to a world-wide copper empire, which he blows up, appearing to become a worthless playboy for a reason you can't guess for 2/3 of the novel. You'll meet Hank Reardon, the archetypical example of the American self-made industrialist, who invents a new kind of metal, stronger and lighter than steel. When you first meet him, he is unable to understand why, not only his country, but his family does not value his creativity and productiveness. He learns why over the course of the novel. The world you live in is the world he lives in, a world in which there are two opposite moral systems in deep conflict. In Atlas Shrugged, you'll meet Ragnar Danneskjold, a modern-day, high-seas pirate who hijacks American relief ships carrying cargo to the failed People's Socialist Paradises around the world. He sells the cargo for gold, which he uses to reimburse people's income tax to them.
The main character? Him you don't meet until 2/3 of the way into the novel. And when you do, you'll have several emotional reactions, one of which is to laugh your head off, because you'll realize that the author has laid clues about this character from the first sentence all the way through. He is the character who has let loose a plot in the world of the novel that makes it clear what the moral conflict is in the world and how it affects your life today, where you live.
This story will make you angry, make you cry, fill you with uplifting feelings, and cause you to say, "I've thought things like this before." You'll see the world around you differently, You'll understand the people around you differently. You'll see yourself differently.
The author is Ayn Rand, a woman whose life was adventurous as the novels she wrote. If you like Atlas, you'll like all the rest of her books.
Now, the recommendation of Atlas Shrugged does come with a warning. Though English was not Ayn Rand's first language, it is written in the purest, most crystal-clear English you have ever read. It will draw you along page after page and it is 1,000 pages. So, you are well-advised to eat, drink and sleep between sections of chapters.
There are two kinds of people who have read Atlas Shrugged. There are those who hate it and would love to gnash teeth on its author. Then, there are those, like me, who will say, "It changed my life."
Several years ago, the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club did a survey among the nation's readers, asking, "What book has most influenced your life?" The number one book was the Bible. Number two was Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand is the thinker who champions you every time you spend time alone with your own mind, doing your own thinking about what you are experiencing in life. And, if you are a businessperson, hers is the only voice on planet Earth that gives a moral defense of your activity in society as a businessperson.
If you love your life on Earth, you'll find Atlas Shrugged is the most inspiring novel ever written.
Book Review: This is a time capsule, not a crystal ball
Summary: 4 Stars
Atlas Shrugged comes to us from a different time. Back then,
+ cigarette smoking was glamorous, and "nobody" suffered from cancers, decreased stamina, or bad breath as a result
+ the United States was the uncontested world leader in the production of oil, steel, automobiles, and other industrial products
+ industrial imagery (factories, locomotives, buildings, etc.) were seen as positive symbols of the triumph of the human mind and of the labor required to construct them, not as generators of pollution or as wasters of natural resources
+ the existence of the Soviet Union and its satellite states struck terror into the hearts of millions of Americans
The last item on that list is the most important, and I believe that many people have forgotten--and some are probably too young to understand--that until the very end of the Cold War, people really DID experience the anxiety and fear of Communism that is expressed in this book. I would recommend reading Atlas Shrugged and 1984, as well as reading about Sen. Joe McCarthy to understand how much fear there was, and how some unscrupulous individuals exploited that fear during that interesting but dangerous time in history.
I believe that Rand's involvement with a small group of fans who called themselves "The Collective" likely impacted the end product that is this book. "The Collective" would meet at Rand's home on Saturday nights to talk philosophy and to read the latest parts of the manuscript of the book. I think that this interaction definitely led Rand to keep adding more and more to the book, to the point that it is much longer than it needs to be. Some of the ideas seem to get hashed and re-hashed, but the repetition doesn't necessarily make them clearer. As if that weren't enough, the ideas are spelled out again in a three-hour-long radio address. The idea that the American public, even in the 1950s, could have had the attention span to focus on a philosophical speech for three hours makes me say (apologies to John Stossel) "Give me a break!" Another problem that I encountered is that Rand seems to want to coin her own philosophical jargon, and this unconventional use of terminology leads to arguments amongst both readers of the book and critics of the philosophy over what Rand was really trying to say.
I am giving the book a four-star rating because I think that it could have had better editing and because I believe that since this is a novel, Rand should have not gone out of her way to introduce terminology or to spoon-feed her philosophy to the reader. Overall, I did have fun with the book, and I think that astute readers will be tickled by various little clues that Rand sprinkles into the story regarding the "mysterious" disappearances that the book's protagonist is trying to understand.
I do not believe that Atlas Shrugged predicts current political events, as this book was written in protest specifically of the Communist Party-controlled countries of the 1950s. Rand, in my opinion, could not have predicted how the world would be fifty years later, just as we cannot predict the world of 2060. I am glad that the Soviet Union collapsed so that the nightmarish vision that runs through most of this book could not become a reality. I think that one can and should learn some general lessons from this book, but one also must accept that the world of today is different from that of fifty years ago.