Anthem

Rating:
Summary: Short book, tall ideas
Review: While the book may be small, the ideas involved - individualism versus collectivism in society - couldn't be greater. It is particularly powerful the way it follows the central character as he comes to understand and appreciate individualism right before the reader's eyes. Hopefully some readers will make the same discovery.

Rating:
Summary: Taut, brilliant.
Review: This is easily Ayn Rand's best work. While not as wide in scope as her other books, Anthem's brevity is part of it's virtue. It's short, taut, and easy to understand while the prose is so beautiful, it's like reading poetry.

It is also the best criticism of collectivist states that work for the "public good" outside of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom". Noone should go through life or form any political opinions without reading this book.

Pickup book. Read. Love it or hate it, but don't ignore this and consider yourself educated.

Rating:
Summary: GRRREAT
Review: at first when i picked up this book it was just for a "i need something to read for 15 min of this class" (SSR...silent sustaind reading) but then once i started reading it, i was taking it home everynight. its a great book on individualism. it shows you how much of it relates to her life growing up in russia. its just awesome. even though some of the things are a little far fetched its a great book with no independence and no values. i hope to look forward to reading her later masterpieces, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. oh and i totally disagree with the incompetent loser who thought that this book was a horrible disgrace. you are so wrong and must not value indepedence and you must not of dug deep enough. :)

Rating:
Summary: Over the Top
Review: Disguise philosophy as fiction all you want--I actually liked THE FOUNTAINHEAD--but this is out of this world. Not only is it a complete, total, and pitiful rip-off of Zamyatin's WE (down to sending the pregnant love-interest into the forbidden forest), it's outrageously pious. Listening to it on Audiobook was like being screamed at in church. I am not an Ayn Rand basher by trade, and have sympathy for many points that she makes about individuality. But come on... Man escapes to the world beyond to reinvent the electric fence so no one can mess with his stuff, and Woman escapes to get knocked up in the garden and gaze all day at her pretty little self in the mirror? (Can she even read? Otherwise, why won't she? The house is full of great literature and her sweetheart does nothing else but read it. At least at the collective she was growing food for people--not her first wsh, perhaps, but it was something. Now she just laughs in delight at the pretty clothes she found at the house. What kind of Brave New Humanity is this?) ANTHEM adds nothing to the anti-utopian genre. Don't bother with it. Skip to her other works if you must read her. Some of her short stories are quite entertaining and there was a play she wrote that I liked (The Night of January 29th? Can't quite remember)... look those up instead if you just want a quick read.

Rating:
Summary: We have found a classic
Review: Imagine a society that's so overrun with collectivism that the very word "I" has been completely removed from the vocabulary of every citizen. This is the premise of AYn Rand's excellent novella. Independant thought is illegal. Striving to be your best and due your best is illegal. Independant choice is illegal. But then one man has an independant thought. He chooses to fall in love with someone who he chose. This novel is an excellent demonstration of the danger of big governmant. Our Founding Fathers advocated a small governmant to keep us from becoming a society like the one described in the book. Unfortunatlly there's far too many people who in today's world have gone away from that original idea. This book is extremely important to today's society. I highly reccomend it. ALso reccomended are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Both are excellent and will help you see the dangers that a socialist society poses.

Rating:
Summary: booh
Review: this was aterrible book on so many levels. but my biggest beef with this book is that ayn rand's fictional writing is so heavily laiden with her rhetorical nonesense that she has failed to win audience before revealing the reason for the story. it's just too transparent for me.

Rating:
Summary: "A libel on the human race"
Review: The quote in my title is by Karl Marx referring to Thomas Malthus' "Essay on Population"--but it's so perfect for Ayn Rand's Anthem, too.

Who the hell would ever line up and willfully participate or supposedly be coerced into a society that just about anyone would find stiffling, unproductive, unstimulating, and so horribly oppressive? The answer is that only the tiniest minority --perhaps in a monastary or some fanatical collective or cult--would submit to such conditions. Human beings are not stupid and they naturally desire freedom and justice. Almost no one, for example, would chose to be slave, for example. Also, history is full of examples of humanity struggling against slavery, colonialism, and even elite corporate globalization. Revolt against systems that oppress seems to be natural to us. People are much smarter than Ayn Rand portrays them; in a very short time almost everyone--and this is definite socialist speaking--would revolt against the undemocratic and just downright klunky and stupid socioeconomic system hammered out in this book. Human beings are not herd animals acting only by instinct. This Randian dystopia is not tenable equillibrium for human beings. "We" are freedom-loving and necessarily reciprocating and beautifully complex social beings as well (oh, sorry for the use of that ghastly "bromide", 'social').

I should also say here that I agree with the protagonist's reaction to the council's rejection of his pitch; I don't think that I would have come to the conclusion of self-worship at which he arrived, though.

Next, I notice many of the reviews here call this book an example of collectivism, socialism, or communism. It is none of these. If any of you objectivists bothered to read even one fair rendering or exposition of socialism you would know that true socialism or communism is based on the acheivement of economic abundance that would be shared so all could be individuals in their own right and not condemmed to being a member of a 'labor force'. Self-management, democracy, and the autonomy of producers (workers) is paramount. So no aged, uniquely empowered, bony-fingered council members to doom you to being a "street sweeper" for the rest of your life.

Not only does this book slander and misrepresent socialism. It does not even remotely resemble some of the most authoritarian state socialisms which were supposedly the harbingers of Rand's dystopia. Under the worst form of collectivism, say, Stalinism, I'm sure that people still chose (o.k., sometimes assigned) work according to apptitude. What's more, math and science were given an extremely high priority in the Soviet Union. For many years, the government of the U.S. was quite concerned about the economic development of the U.S.S.R. Where was there any indication that socialisms of the 1930s would someday lead to electricity being abolished from the face of the earth?

I could go on I suppose, but I just must end by saying that I do not reccommend this ridiculous book except if you want a quick introduction to Objectivist ideas. To be fair, I have heard that she has written better books. I have read parts of "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal" and I have had enough. "Anthem" is not even good as a sample of a good individualist or pro-capitalist argument (for that, you might read Uncle Milty's "Capitalism and Freedom"). I believe Rand's form of ethical egoism to be a immoral system in which you can exert power and coerce other human beings for your own profit. Objectivism is an apologia for the unequal and unjust exercise of property and power and the privilages that result...elitism, pure and simple.

We should reject both capitalist control over our lives and our economy and revolt against state tranny as well...as "we" always have throughout history, in our time, and surely in the future.

If you want a truly masterful dystopia, read that of the great socialist truth-teller and lover of freedom George Orwell: "1984".

Rating:
Summary: Anthem
Review: This short novelette is comparable to books such as 1984 and Brave New World. The world is controlled by the government and everyone does everything for everyone. The main character is named Equality 7-2521. Every person has a name like that.. a word representing equality, solidarity, togetherness followed by numbers, and though each person is seperate they all much refer to themselves as "we" instead of "I." In this world it is forbidden to do anything for your own happiness, but Equality is much smarter than the society wants him to be, so he works on his own to learn about the "unmentionable times" (I suppose like the time we are in now) and descover things on his own about all human life. He even goes after love, which is one thing that people are never taught about.

This book is very interesting if you are into books like 1984 or Brave New World. It's quite like both books, exept shorter. I liked this one, and it was a fast read, but I don't think it was long enough or different enough. The lives of these people were so much like the lives of those in 1984 that it seems like it could have just been another short tale from someone else in Orwell's book. I like how Rand made the society abolish words like "I," since the purpose was to get rid of vanity and ego. It is an interesting thought that Equality has about how people would give up the word "I" because it had to have happened at some point. The main difference from 1984 is that it has a happy ending, or so we are led to believe. In the end Equality has good intentions, but who knows how it would all end up some day.

Rating:
Summary: Complete your quartet of dystopias
Review: A much overlooked dystopia. This is an amazing (an amazingly short) novel along the same themes of Zamyatin's "We", Orwell's "1984", and Huxley's "Brave New world". This is just as important, in my mind as the other three. It is much shorter and more concise than the others so there's no reason not to read it. Rand's has obvious bias undertones of Objectivism but it is still a great read.

Equality 7-2521 lives in the future where there is no electricity or much technology to speak of and society is regulated city to city by a council that determines what every person is going to do with their life. Fighting against the great "We" and breaking the laws by loving a woman and wanting to learn and discover when it is not his job, the reader is taken into a faceless future to see the values and necessity for individualism.

Rating:
Summary: Precursor to Anthem and 1984
Review: "Anthem" was published prior to "1984", however both came after Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We." I personally prefer "We."
I do recommend reading all three.