Atlas Shrugged

Rating:
Summary: Worth the read, even if you don't agree with it
Review: Atlas Shrugged presents characters that, in our current world of welfare and social security, seem contrary to our understandings of protagonists and antagonists. So, even if you think that greed is evil, and therefore that this book is completely messed up, you still have something to gain from reading it. It will help you understand why intellectual property rights are so important to innovation and progress. Or, it will make you hate the greed of some people, and thus you will embrace the social awareness that makes this country great. Either way, it will change the way you think about the world.

The book is the proper extention of liberalism, as another reviewer states. However, democrats need not worry, because the traditional idea of liberalism is quite different from what the USA terms "liberal." Liberalism is the idea that free trade, without governmental interference and without lobbies, creates and sustains progress. Basically, without free trade, the world as we know it wouldn't exist. While I myself am a Democrat who disagrees with this idea in certain instances, I still recognize that there is some relevence to this idea, which comes forth in Atlas Shrugged. Rand tells the reader (many times) that free trade, without prohibitions, allows for the greatest result. But even more important, she calls for the protection of intellectual property rights, and says that when workers strike, new workers can be hired, but when innovators strike, the entire world is in trouble.

So, why read Atlas Shrugged? Sure, the characters might be a little stiff, and the entire story is definitely biased toward one way of thinking...But the book will definitely make you reconsider your perspective on business and on the functioning of this country, all through a story that is actually quite interesting. And while you read and learn, you will finally grasp Ayn Rand's enormous question, "Who is John Galt?"

Rating:
Summary: Ayn helps provide direction and moral clarity
Review: At 1100 small print pages, this book is way too long for people who do not seek enlightenment and the improvement of their own lives. People like elitist condescending professors who deny reality while existing on the public dole. People like that will never be able to finish this book, to pierce the veil of their own ignorance and to see the horror of their own lives full of "worship of the zero" and of looting.

For those common people of action and of deeds of renown seeking self understanding - this book provides a glorious shining arrow of direction and a guide to the proper behavior of men in the face of socialism. The book provides the reader purpose, ambition and hope via the shining light of reason based on objective reality. It lights a bright light on the best of man and woman and sweeps away the deadly shadows of collectivism (fascism + socialism). Collectivism which is practiced eagerly by the republican and democratic collectivist gangs of looters and perpetrators of oppression we have running our affairs today.(...)

This book has aged extremely well. There are a lot of delicious highly relevant gems. For example, when the society of the looters has descended into anarchy, she writes "'California's blown to pieces', he reported in the evening. There is a civil war going on there - if that's what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They've declared that they are seceding from the union, but nobody knows who's now in power. There's armed fighting all over the state between a 'People's party' led by Ma Chambers and her soybean cult of orient-admirers - and something called 'Back to God' led by some former oil field owners".

My friends - this is the democarts and republicans as exist today. Ayn Rand has deduced the future brilliantly. This book was written in 1957. 1957!

Ayn helps provide direction and moral clarity. No wonder some people read this and can't stand the sight of themselves.

Rating:
Summary: BEWARE OF LIES
Review: An old lie about this novel is cropping up again in some of the reviews below, and readers considering whether or not to buy and read *Atlas Shrugged* should not be fooled by this lie.

Critics who don't like the novel's politics charge that the author (Ayn Rand) was, in this novel, advocating the murder of her opponents. This is the reverse of the truth - a "Big Lie" on the scale of a Goebbels whopper.

Here's an example. One reviewer writes that in *Atlas Shrugged* "the bulk of the human race [is murdered] so that an ultra-talented, atheistic cabal can inherit the world." He then speaks of "the resultant society of mass-murderers."

The truth is that the novel shows its heroes persecuted for years by statists - fascist/communist types who destroy freedom at the point of a gun and send the country (and the world) down the drain. In response, the heroes do no violence to the villains. They don't lift a hand against them. Instead, they withdraw to a secret valley where they can no longer be harmed. As a result, their talents are no longer available for the villains to take advantange of and the villains' society and government collapses. (The resulting state is described as being akin to the "chaos" of pre-industrial China.) Just after this happens, the heroes return to rebuild and their rights are better appreciated.

Now, to believe that this story is an advocacy of *murder* is the same as believing that standing up to crooks is "robbery." After all - this so-called argument runs - not allowing crooks to steal what you have is the same as taking it from them. If there were such a thing as vampires, the Vampire Lobby would holler that people who resisted them are guilty of "murder" - because vampires die without the blood they obtain by violence.

Bullies are deprived of "self-esteem" when their victims stand up to them. More power to the victims, I say.

Would you accuse the opponents of slavery in the 1800s of mass-murder for "trying to starve the South" - since cotton (which was picked by slaves) was the basis of the South's economy, and without slaves the economy would collapse and people would go hungry? Thought not.

The amazing irony of the lie about ~murder~ being told about *Atlas Shrugged* is that it's the novel's villains who are violent, coercive, murderering - while the heroes practice only non-violent resistance. In fact, the climax of the story is when the villains have the main hero strapped to a torture machine, trying to force him to join the government and become a dictator! (So that their government would be preserved.)

(One hero, Ragnar, does steal back what governments stole from the heroes, which involves gun battles at sea. But he is an exception among the heroes - and he places all the enemy crews in lifeboats before he destroys their ships!)

In short: the critics of *Atlas Shrugged* are accusing non-violent resisters of murder. The robbed are being called the robbers. The good are being called evil. That's why I call this lie a "Big Lie" - a lie so stupid it just might work. Don't let it work with you.

Rating:
Summary: A lovely addition to any fire.
Review: Five stars, one star. Five stars, one star. Over and over the same pattern. Seems as humans, we're evenly divided into two camps: those who think everything is fundamentally simple, and those who think things are complex and interrelated. If you're a member of the former camp - the "right vs. wrong," "good vs. evil," "us vs. them" set - you'll probably enjoy Atlas Shrugged; you'll think Rand tells it like it is and you'll like her powerful writing style too. Thank you for reading my review, and enjoy the book.

But if you're a member of the latter camp - if you value subtlety, insight, complex characters, a believable plot, and thought-provoking dialogue - then RUN from Ayn Rand. Unless you're researching how the "us vs. them" crowd thinks, in which case you should stock up on Tylenol first. To read Rand is to have the sensation of someone pounding on your forehead with a hammer. Penguin Putnam ought to attach a medal to the inside back cover as a reward to anyone who made it through the book. I know I wanted one.

Full review follows:

Non-ideologues and those attempting to read Atlas as literature and not as a political doctrine are almost certain to be disappointed by the book. It fails for sheer lack of merit. Its characters, while colorfully imagined, are not provided with distinctive voices. One sounds much like another - strident, tendentious, and monothematic. Sentences run on to become paragraphs, paragraphs run on to become chapters, and some characters' lines - most notably Galt's - run on to become full-blown speeches of fifty pages or more. If you've ever wondered how a writer could develop diarrhea of the pen and create a book four or five times longer than it needs to be, Atlas is a must-read.

Any editor could have improved this book. We can almost hear Rand, fresh from her success with The Fountainhead, telling the publisher "you will print it exactly as is. Not one word changed, not one sentence deleted. Otherwise I will take it somewhere else." At 1,000-plus pages, Atlas is a monument to the writer's ego.

And it reads it. There is no hint of Rand's humanity; she coldly kills off the bulk of the human race so that an ultra-talented, atheistic cabal can inherit the world. That one might not want to live in the resultant society of mass-murderers is never examined, because at the end of the book everyone is either capitalist or dead. I wonder how long it would be before the survivors started killing each other off as well - because hey, if I have what's yours as well as what's mine, that's twice as good. Without a system of ethics or morals to guide us, human society quickly degenerates to the tribal. Trust me, you don't want to go back to the jungle.

Poor character development, strident tone, bad dialogue, wildly improbable plot, no examination of complex issues, no presentation of alternative or conflicting viewpoints, no sense of humanity, and an editor paid to vacation in Miami until after the book had come out. I give this book exactly one star.

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Great Novel
Review: Atlas Shrugged is one of the most powerful novels ever written and when you consider that the major theme is about the relationship between the actions and consequenses of hundres of characters throughout every strata of society, it's an amazing feat. Rand's ability to weave a series of complex economic lessons into a compelling plot makes this book a superb tool for teaching lessaiz-faire economics in the guise of entertainment. That having been said, the book does have a couple of flaws. Rand's characters exist only to advance the plot. They are cyphers aside from the brief moments when they declaim their economic or philosophical positions and then act on them, to the advancement of the plot, but without making the characters anything more than chess pieces. Mind you, they're brilliantly manipulated chess pieces, but they remind the reader that this is ultimately less a novel than a morality play. The second flaw is the thirty pages of Galt's speech that ends the book. I've read Atlas Shrugged half a dozen times, and I've never gotten through that speech in one sitting. It kills the climax of the story. It's really unnecessary, as the rest of the novel more than makes her points.

Rating:
Summary: Moral Capitalism Has Arrived, Get Used to It!!!
Review: Ayn Rand in this magnificent novel identifies for the reader for the first time in history the nature of collectivism and religious doctrine to show how they feed on Capitalism in order to exist. She shows how the Anti Trust Laws are early instruments created by the parasites of the left to control businesses and their owners.
Ayn Rand offers us a full and complete arsenal of intellectual ammunition with which to destroy collectivist and subjectivist jargon. Read this book and arm yourself for those moments when you hear some so called college professor from the state run school system say: "Facts are relative. What's a fact to you is not a fact to me. What is a fact to me is not a fact to others. Facts don't exist!!!" And then you can say, "Professor, is that a fact?" Miss Rand shows us that reason and logic is the ammunition that neutralizes these enemies of rational thought.

She shows us how reason and logic are powerful tools in the search for happiness on earth. She shows us the pitfalls of self-deception, self-sacrifice, and self-immolation. She arms us to see con men a mile away. When a deist claims there is a God, say, prove it and watch him come unraveled. Since he is not able to prove his assertion, he will begin to attack the human mind as unable to understand his superior thought. It's a con game used by cons the world over to overpower good, benevolent, but gullible people.
Miss Rand shows us that the Soul-Body conflict presented to us by Plato is the beginning of the powerful monopoly that the church has on defining morality today. Aristotle, the creator of logic, is Miss Rand's rock on which she builds a philosophy for men and women who want to be happy here on earth, now, not later in some mystical place beyond the grave.

She shows us the enemy. The left wants to control our body and take our money, for the poor of course; their need supersedes our rights and the leftist politician garners more votes by redistributing your wealth to those who will show their appreciation at the voting booth. That's the short range objective. The long range goal is to take us back to the middle ages when man was a happy collective much closer to the earth. We were closer to the earth alright, but in a very unpleasant, and unhygenic way, where half the population was wiped out by the plague every ten years..

The right wants to control our minds with thoughts that are above our ability to understand. In other words, "when you talk to us, disconnect your mind". Oh yes, you must be obedient at all times and don't ask questions. They have fires for people who don't behave.

Both enemies depend on one thing - that you don't think.

If you have any mind left, read this book. It is a superb mystery story that includes, action, philosophy, love and sex.

Rating:
Summary: Less Philosophy, more Art please
Review: Many of the reasons given by reviewers for liking this book, or not liking it, hinge around how reviewers feel about the philosophy that supposedly underpins it (Objectivism); thus it seems that a lot of negative assertions about the book are actually negative assertions about Rand as a person.

I have to tell you that I started reading Rand before I ever heard of the philosophy, and the first story I read (as a kid) was Anthem- which I loved. There is very little "philsophy" qua philosophy in Anthem. So I moved then onto Atlas Shrugged. This book is not good- and not because of the views that it espouses, nor because Rand is a bad, wicked, or tasteless person. Baldly put, it is not good because it is poorly written.

People do not speak in a realistic way, nor do they act, think or feel in a way that is believable. All of the caracthers are, in fact, carachitures. Is this allegory? If so, then it clings to much to modernist conventions; and if it is modernist, then it is too flatly sketched out.

If I want to read objectivist philosophy, then I will pick up a non-fiction collection fo essays on that philosophy. When I read literature, I expect literature. Very badly done.

Rating:
Summary: For Thinkers Only
Review: If you are a "sheeple" who bahs along conforming to society, you will probably dislike this book. In short, I saw it as a story of what would happen to the world if all of the smart people went on strike. As you read this book, think about it, and you will see it is SCAREY how close it is to the world today. 'Each according to his ability, each according to his need.' I will admitt that the speech at the end is very loooooonnnnnggggg, I skimmed through it. Some of it was awesome, and some of it was ugh, yawn, lets get it over with.

Rating:
Summary: Kept me going when no one else could
Review: When I read this book as a young, "impressionable" female engineering student - I was looking for a role model in a field where frankly, there aren't many. Dagny inspired and motivated me so much that I feel silly saying my only hero in life is a fictional character. My grandmother even read this book as a young engineering student and likewise found comfort and inspiration in Dagny. I can only hope more girls read this book.

Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Notice I didn't say "The best book I ever read," or "A classic," or any of the other usual comments? Reason: This is a fantastic book, unlike anything else ever written in history. It is vital. It is original. It is disturbing. It is riveting. But it is not a page turner, commercially successful, made for the masses-type of book. If you're looking for "The Da Vinci" code or "Bark of the Dogwood" types of reads, this isn't it. But if you're looking for a book that will change the way you look at society, make you think, disturb you, and hopefully change some habits, this is the one. My only real hesitation with the "work" is the lengthy speech at the end. Could have done without that. Otherwise, just great.