Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
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Book Reviews of Atlas Shrugged
Book Review: All Time Best
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow - what can I say. This is my favorite novel of all time. Rand comes the closest I've ever read to capturing the true nature of man in this novel. What a genius she was. The novel is a bit too long and the 10-page soliloquies could have easily been shortened without losing the point, but the characters are perfect symbols of human nature at its best (the heroes) and at its worst (the villains). Rand's use of language is musical:
p. 761 - When describing the Sky & Streets of New York: "The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust."
p. 832 - When Dagny's company started to faulter due to the lack of supplies in the world, Rand perfectly illustrates Dagny's anxiety: "An emergency file in her office kept a record of all the crucial materials still on hand, on every division of Taggart Transcontinental. Like the file of a bankrupt, it kept registering losses, while the rare additions of new supplies seemed like the malicious chuckles of some tormentor throwing crumbs at the starving continent."
Rand also uses an incredible amount of symbolism:
-trains representing minds in motion--when the trains stopped running, minds stopped innovating (which in turn made more trains stop running)
-train track respresenting man's life going in a straight direction, purposeful, not circular
-dollar sign - the sign of the trader, the moral man
-oak tree representing America, strong in the beginning, but rotting from within
-steel/metal and the bracelet made of it - represented products of man's mind
- and of course - Atlas Shrugging
...to name a few. But the biggest contribution of Atlas Shrugged are the underlying themes that fill every page and promote Rand's self-designed philosophy of objectivism. Those themes are:
-The Individual vs. The Public Good
-True Values
-Taking Responsibility for One's Own Actions
-The Categorization of all as Looters, Moochers, & Producers
-Stopping the World's Economy
-Sex as an End to the Means of Production, the End Value
-Greatest Virtue: To Make Money
Needless to say, I recommend it to anyone who can find the time to read a 1000 page book. If so, I guarantee you find it worth your while.
Jennifer Bouani
Author of Tyler and His Solve-a-Matic Machine
Teaching Kids how to be Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders
Book Review: Great book - a must read
Summary: 5 Stars
I am going to get the one negative part out of the way. The book is over 1000 pages long. While I think it is a great book it seemed to me that Ayn Rand often took the very long scenic route. About 200-300 pages in I started skipping sentences and later even whole paragraphs. I kept hearing my mind: Ok, I got it! It felt like how many times can you write about the same thing using different words. I even skipped half the speech. To me it felt like watching a movie and in the middle of it you have to listen to the entire State of the Union address....I wanted to get back to the story.
The story centers around Dagny Taggart. She and her brother James are heirs to Taggart Transcontinental, a rail road. The story was written over 50 years ago, so it was James who took over the rail road, but it was Dagny who had the desire and was the one capable of running it. Yet she was a woman, and a woman at that time did not belong in a position like that, but she did not care about that. Her hard work earned her the respect of the workers and contempt of her brother.
The book shows what happends when the ones who make this country great had enough of the ones who want to redistribute the wealth (other peoples wealth) and if anyone disagrees with their progressive views, they demonize them in public and call them greedy and selfish. I laught when I found out what really happened to the Rio Norte line. I thought to myself, good for you, when I found out what Ellis Wyatt did and I could not blame anyone who left the looters behind.
What I loved about the book is that Ayn Rand had such a great understanding on how the world works and the evils out to destroy it. In the last half century nothing much has changed. The only reason this country is still great, is because there are still enough people who are capable of producing wealth who are willing to fight the looters and progressives of todays world. It was scary to read about regulations, forcing businesses to share even if it meant that some would be forced to shut down as a result. A directive, where no one was allowed to quit their job with no possibility of advancement unless the Unification Board approved it. Some of those job and freedom killing regulations sounded very familiar in todays world: Card Check, the fairness doctrine - nothing fair about this one, the proposed FCC's net nutrality rule regarding the internet. This book is as relevant today as it was when Ayn Rand wrote it.
Book Review: What happens when Atlas shrugs?
Summary: 5 Stars
This book will tell you what happens.
I started reading this because I was inspired by some of Rand's essays. I continued to read it because I was so excited by what she was writing. Never have I read a _novel_ with the kind of real world quality that this has. Not only does she keep everything realistic and believable, her language and ideas are very accessible.
In this book, Rand exposes so many of the things that rely on morality. Morality is like plumbing, we don't think about it until it's broken. What Rand is trying to do is show us that our plumbing (collectively) is broken.
As a whole, our moral code is not something that we consciously contemplate (well, not everyone), but we must. Following the plumbing analogy: Do you think about what you flush down the toilet? Pour down the kitchen sink drain? Why would it be any less important to ponder the results of choices in other aspects of our lives?
Writ large is what happens when we consciously decide to stop thinking about the "Why?", in regards to actions and motives. People live and die by the choices they make, and, as Rand illustrates, even more die by other people's choices. What's wrong with this picture? These people don't have to die! They're dying because the choices holding their lives in jeopardy are being relegated to the least competent people.
Rand may be labeled as "cold", "cruel", "vicious", and "in-human", but we would live in a truly dark world if that were the way we felt about all the people who give 100% with the expectation of a reward worth exactly as much, nothing more. Rand isn't telling us to revolt, she's telling us to demand what is rightfully ours: pride! Pride is the recognition that the products of your labor are valuable, that YOU are valuable. Anyone who tells you to work twice as hard so they can eat is taking food from your mouth. What Rand doesn't do is call this what it really is, slavery.
In the end, the biggest messages that Rand is sending is that selfishness IS NOT a crime, excellence IS NOT a crime, pride IS NOT a crime. The world relies on you, but the world doesn't care about you, YOU must. Rand doesn't hate the working class, she says that the greatest to be expected of anyone is for them to do the best that they can, nothing less will suffice, even if the best they can offer is their labor. BUT, only if you are furthering your own interests, anything else is coercion.
Book Review: A Timless Message
Summary: 5 Stars
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is not just a novel; it is an intellectual illustration of the author's philosophy. It is also a suspense thriller, a mystery, a love story, and a self help book all rolled into one. It has been in continuous publication for over fifty years and people are still reading it. Why? Because though the philosophy is not perfect, it is not nearly as flawed as the other philosophies dished up and accepted for the last couple of thousand years. Ordinary man is not a worm; he is an individual and the values he adopts as an individual matter, they are the things that keep civilization moving, or freeze it into a static corpse. In reading Confucius one learns everyone and everything has a place and in this there is harmony, but there is no place for change. This is a major fault found in most philosophies and religious doctrines. The acceptable strategies for achieving happiness are all based on yesterday and today, none of them work when pitted against the only true constant of the universe, Change. Tomorrow always brings change, whether embraced or rejected, it comes and must be dealt with.
The characters in this story at the time of their creation were considered to be much larger than life, but life has gotten bigger since then and in today's world they feel only a little above real people we see in the news all the time. The story exposes the dark side of communism and the dangers of government meddling with the market, while inventors and entrepreneurs struggle to move the world into tomorrow. It begins with the sensing of change, the world is sliding into decay and stagnation. People have adopted cultural philosophies that are not logical and their civilization is not just slowing down, it's starting to fall backward. Instead of admiring achievement, people vilify it, feeling they should support those who can't achieve because this is a more noble way of behaving. Their philosophies are a lot like the recent acceptance of PC (politically correctness), where the truth and validity of an argument was not as important how it was stated and some things could not be discussed at all because such discussions were deemed not PC.
This is a book that will entertain and enlighten you and it could change the way you feel about those who criticize your achievements. At the time it was published the book had a message, but times have changed and interestingly enough the message has grown larger.
Book Review: Ayn Rand's definitive novel.
Summary: 5 Stars
Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's masterpiece that lays out her philosophy of objectivism in an epic tale. It is also one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read.
This book will appeal to the young with high expectations of the future and to the successful with pride of their accomplishments, espousing individualism, self-confidence, self-respect, production, and pride, while demonizing pity, helplessness, laziness, uncertainty, liberalism, and weakness. The heroes of the book are great industrialist that act in rational and confident manners to accomplish their goals. The villains are abstract philosophers and progressives that preach the helplessness of man and behave as cowards and sneaksters. The producers and movers attempt to fight off the relentless moochers and looters, who stab and grad from and depend on the producers they are trying to ruin. The story chronicles what happens when the movers of the last free-market country on Earth (America) finally have enough and refuse to feed the beast any longer.
This novel relays important lessons that readers should take to the heart. Besides the obvious dangers of socialism and communism, Atlas Shrugged also highlights the dangers of pure democracy. As elected officials (and the populace in general) become convinced of the unfairness of corporate tycoons making too much money (Ahem.. Exxon) while the "underprivileged" are left behind (Ahem.. Walmart), danger arises in the passage of laws that take the "free" out of free-market capitalism. It is important to realize that just because we live in a free democracy, we must always be on the lookout for social-progressive thinking gaining a foothold in the American mindset.
Rand gives tribute to the ideals of America.. In the words of Fransisco D'Aconia, "the first and only time in history, a country of money... no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America,.. a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement."
There is a lot you could learn from this book, with characters such as Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Fransisco D'Aconia, Wesely Mouch, and Jim Taggart each having a well-fleshed-out history and emotional clarity. There is a lot more I could say about this 1100+ page novel, but I promised to keep it short, so I'll just say this: READ IT and then REREAD IT when you begin to forget why you loved it so much the first time.