Rating: 
Summary: Live by your own standards
Review: Rand's view that our own creations breathe some form of ourselves underlies the story in The Fountainhead. When others cannot create in the same way, they look to squelch it. A novel of true creativity and individualism. Worth a good, long read.
Rating:
Summary: Should be 6 stars
Review: If you can understand the true meaning of the book, than it should move you. Truly the greates piece of lit I ever read,Ayn Rand provides the basis Of Objectivism, her theme, through the lives of a number of different mind set people. The individual vs the collectivist. Ayn Rand didn't write the book to tell her reader's how the majority of the world becomes successful, she displayed a way to feel content with inside yourself.
Rating:
Summary: The Fountainhead
Review: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is masterfull. I loved the way all the charachters were realistic. This book is one of the best ones I have ever read. I hope everyone else who reads it gets as much from it as I did.
Rating:
Summary: A piece of my mind.
Review: Where to begin, where to begin. This book is quite possibly the best I have ever read. Sure it is challenging, but the time spent wrapping yourself into and very well becoming the characters is worth every second. The fact that it still enters my mind after having read it 6 months ago is a true example of the potential impact it can create. I suggest this book to anyone who feels that todays world and standards just don't hold true to what your heart is telling you. Read it, but don't stop there. To grasp the true meaning you have to really hear what the book and it's author is telling you. Amazing.
Rating:
Summary: A classic ignored by mainstream intellectuals
Review: Like Atlas Shrugged, this tale is an extraordinary one. Ayn Rand worked within the realm of ideas and their consequences. The characters here are both the usual and the heroic. Howard Roark, our hero, stands firm for individual integrity, against the critics and the masses until his point-of-view wins out. The greatness of Rand's work is that she sets a path in which mediocrity loses. Like any philosophy, her work didn't change the world, but had a deep impact on individuals that changed themselves and helped to make the world that much better. The villain Ellsworth Toohey is one of the great nemesis' in American literature. He is plainly passive-aggressive. He uses people's insecurities for his own power. Much like many villains in real life, Toohey defeats his foes through subtleties and pawns. He spends a lifetime propping up disciples around him for insulation. The bandwagon mentaility means that none of his ideas need ever come under logical scrutiny. When his game is discovered, his power is such, that he is not easily defeated. Roark's use of logical rhetoric at the conclusion of the novel is such that Toohey's nefarious work is rendered meaningless. For as good as the work is, I am opposed to Rand's atheism. She would replace God with the worship of man. Her heroic characters certainly make a case for such, but in real life even our most brilliant men are not without flaws and contradictions. I believe that God would want man to as heroic as Rand sees him. Rand would feel any recognition of a superior being would cast man back into the pool of the collective. This disagreement would put me outside the realm of Rand followers, but I love the book anyway and feel that it has a great deal to offer anyone who believes in individual liberty or is open to hear a case for it.
Rating: 
Summary: A very interesting, but confusing book
Review: I have to say that this book was really a challenge for me to read. When I purchased the book I didn't think that I would like it, but I said what the hell I'll give it a chance, because you never know. It turned out to be very interesting. I enjoyed the way the author used two architects to portray two different outlooks on life. In order to enjoy this book you have to go into reading it with an open mind, and if you don't then the whole point will be missed. Read it you may have a different outlook on life when you've finished. This is the type of book that really makes you think while reading it. So if your in for a challenge I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A pulprit to preach a sermon
Review: A good book, although it's very much like Atlas Shrugged--I think I like Atlas better. Howard and Dominique are both cold and indifferent to everyone and everything but each other. The end is not at all surprising. In fact, hardly anything in the book surprises me. Rand uses her books as a pulprit to preach the same sermon again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Hmmm...
Review: I'm only thirteen, and in the eighth grade, so when the my reading teacher handed me this book, I wasn't exactly dying to read it. I mean, I'm a teenager! I didn't think I was supposed to read books that big. Anyway, to make her happy (and just to see if I really could finish it) I started. In the beginning, it was just "Yeah, yeah, he's an architect, no one like him, how can someone write 704 pages about this?", but after a while, I really like it. Howard Roark is a lot like many people out there that are amazing human beings who strive to keep their ideals, and not give in to society. Peter Keating, on the other hand, is willing to do anything, as long as it pleases the boss. When he discovers that he really has no idea what is style is, and that the only reason he's gotten a good reputation is by doing what he's told, it's up to Howard to save him. There were some parts where RAnd actually came out and directly gave her philosophical view, but that added to the plot, and actually assisted the character development of Roark, and explained a lot of Keating's mistakes. In the end, both mn are fighting for survival, and both are fighting their own demons, including each other, and they're going to half to claw their way out of the mess they've created one way or another.
Rating:
Summary: Barbara Taylor Bradford on steroids, or better
Review: I suspect it took a certain amount of guts to write a book like this in the 1940s, with Hitler recently disposed of and the literary trend for kitchen sinks and bedpans just getting underway - a trend which is still very much with us, as the popularity of cute little writers like Kingsley Amis clearly demonstrates. The Fountainhead deals with large, roughly drawn, simpler-than-life characters - a visionary architect, his compromising colleague, a press baron, a woman who at one time or another marries all three of them, and a slimy newspaper pundit - all of them engaged in a battle which (Rand makes it very very obvious indeed) is nothing less than the war for Truth against Lies, for Freedom against Oppression, for the very Soul of Man against those Forces which would drag it down into the mire. Until the very end, when the architect starts spouting, for ten straight pages, the very same morals which have been pounded into us with exemplary force over the preceding seven hundred, it works remarkably well, thanks to Rand's vivid and mercifully unpretentious prose and her evident conviction. People have complained that the hero is inhuman, but that's precisely the point - heroes aren't supposed to have the petty failings of the rest of us, and until the nineteenth century they generally didn't. Howard Roark is an optimistic, present-day, "realist" revision of the old dragon-slaying Beowulf/Siegfried type; the casting of Gary Cooper in the equally interesting and equally bombastic film version was an inspiration. Where the book fails is in Rand's inability to find a plausible way for Roark to win through against the odds she has so convincingly shown to be stacked against him. She uses a deus ex machina in the form of a newspaper tycoon - imagine Rupert Murdoch throwing his weight behind Frank Lloyd Wright or Antonio Gaudi - and, later, that good old standby the Great American Jury. Laissez-faire capitalism, and the democracy Rand has so beautifully satirised and demolished in the person of columnist Ellsworth Toohey, join hands and become twin fairy godmothers magicking the hero to his wedding and a great career. It's a disappointingly cowardly ending to a largely well-written and uncompromisingly epic work that is also, and not least importantly, one hell of a page-turner.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but...........
Review: Fountainhead gets its four stars because it is a great novel and because it effectively presents some wonderful ideas (individual ability and effort alone yields real achievement; integrity should never be compromised; selfishness, in a specific sense, is a virtue) through the romanticized super hero, Howard Roark. But wait a minute. There are a few things you must remember, before you bury your nose in the book. In her desire to present a complete view of life, Rand found it convenient to deny the existence of everything that did not measure up to her own tunnel vision. There is a danger in thinking that Rand's is an integrated philosophy. It is as integrated as laboratory experiments are, in which you ignore or nullify the effects of certain things. This is alright for experiments in simulated lab conditions, not in real life. Rand applies this inadequate approach to real world. Well, we can't expect any one system to provide answer for every thing, and the danger is in thinking that 'Yes! This is the way it is'. In Rand's writings you meet nice people who turn out to be weak in the knees, or have venom in their hearts, and rude ones, who turn out to be heroic. A combination you don't always come across in the real world. But conditioned to associate certain behaviour with certain others, you may find yourself barking at the wrong trees. Beware. Think for yourself. Perhaps this is the crux of Rand's philosophy. As in one of Rand's early plays, the hero admonishes a kid 'Don't let them steal your soul' (or mind or something to that effect). But generations of Rand's fans have been doing just that. Surrendering their ability to think to Rand. Leaning heavily on her writings rather than their own experience. Doling out Randspeak with an air of originality. Forming a cult, whose goddess is Rand. Just have a look at some of reviews in this section for examples. A proponent of rationality, Rand sways her readers not by reason, but by emotion. You may not realise it for the chains of such emotional appeals are too light to be felt, until they are too heavy to be broken. Nothing wrong in it. For any good literature appeals to the heart. But the problem is you may reel under a spell of emotion to deify rationality, or worse Rand herself. Rand's books have often been criticized, primarily because of destructive influence they have on those who take them too seriously. For you, however, there should be no problem as long as you don't suspend rationality.
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