Anthem

Rating:
Summary: A Statement for the Individual
Review: Ayn Rand's "Anthem" is a great book for those that hold themselves as true individuals. Essentially this book communicates the glory of individuals as unique to themselves, as humanity a vast amount of countless beings all different from each other. "Anthem" is also a slap in the face of collectivism, of the idea that all people should work for the good of society as an abstract whole, without regards to themselves.
This book was written to inform collectivists of the potentially dangerous circumstance that could occur from their ideology. We are essentially looking into a future where the individual is completely surrendered to a faceless entity called society. The book predated Orwell and Huxley and provides a no less chilling view of the future. Still vital today.

Rating:
Summary: We Have Assumed Control!
Review: I had learned of this book through listening to Rush 2112. I approached it being very skeptical. I did not know what to expect! What I found was an awesome story and message! To me it says that we have a mind of our own and we should use it. If you have ever been interested in reading "deep" material, try this book. It has close to 100 pages and is very easy to become hooked in the reading! I highly recomend this book to everyone! Becareful, though! You could actually learn something from it!

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, although quite short
Review: A beautiful book, although, as the name implies, I felt it was a bit short. I would have enjoyed hearing about the society that Equality 7-2521 lived in in with more eloquent and descriptive writing such as how the latter part of the book was written, but overall I felt that it was a great book, althoug it took me some time to get into with the slow beginning.

Rating:
Summary: excellent intro to Rand
Review: Equality 7-2521 is a street sweeper in a dystopic future where:

We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist
through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.

But Equality 7-2521 has a problem; he doesn't believe in the things that his brothers do. He has questions, which can not even be asked, that he wants answered. He has a friend (International 4-8818), which is forbidden, and then he falls in love with a woman he calls "The Golden One" (Liberty 5-3000). And as if all these crimes weren't bad enough, he's started to do experiments in an abandoned culvert and he's figured out electricity. But he's willing to accept the consequences for his crimes because he's certain that his discovery is so important to Mankind as to absolve him of all blame. He is, of course, wrong. Because in this society, it is not a good thing for an individual to discover new knowledge: "This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them." So Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 escape into the wilderness surrounding the city and, after renaming each other Prometheus and Gaea, begin to work out a philosophy where the self, the individual, is important. Prometheus realizes:

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke the chains. Then he was enslaved by the
kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he
broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king
nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man,
and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which
the blood of centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them
to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We."

...

Perhaps in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who
refused to surrender [the word I.] What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw
coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. And they, these few,
fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banner smeared by their own blood. And they
chose to perish, for they knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.

Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their
hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never
be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all
the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep,
but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will go on. Man, not men.

Ayn Rand espoused a hard line capitalist philosophy which she called Objectivism--''the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.'' During a period of years when one type of Collectivism or another (Socialism, Fascism, Communism) was regnant in virtually every nation in the West, she courageously swam against the tide of her time and demanded recognition of the primacy of the individual and of self interest as a force for good. As a result, she has been ignored by the arts establishment, by philosophers and by political scientists, but she has a strong cult following and nearly every young person has, at least, a flirtation with her ideas. There are legions of us who first read her in college and developed a ferocious intellectual crush on her for her iconoclasm and for the pure ferocity of her rhetoric. Here, at last, was someone telling us that the liberal pabulum we had been spoon fed for the first 18 years of life was moral poison. What a glorious moment when you discover that there are other people who, like you, think that individuals matter, that personal excellence should be celebrated, that anything that limits the rights and the abilities of individuals is evil.

One of the most telling indicators of the dichotomy between critics and the common folk is to compare her absence from the Modern Library Top 100 novels of the 20th Century list to the lofty placement of her novels on the lists where readers voted (i.e., Radcliffe's 100 Best Novels, Modern Library Readers' List & Koen Books Top 100) The critics may not respect her much, but we of the hoi polloi sure seem to like her. And, of course, Ms Rand has gotten the final laugh as it is her philosophy that has triumphed and, along with the careful tending of her acolyte and former boy toy Alan Greenspan, given the world a period of unprecedented economic growth and political freedom. The continued refusal of the intelligentsia to acknowledge her, merely serves to make her accomplishment all the more remarkable. When the dust has settled, a few decades or centuries from now, one assumes (okay, one hopes) that Keynes and Galbraith, Marx and Rawls, Dreiser and Lewis and Sinclair--all of the thinkers and writers of the failed Left--will have been consigned to oblivion and the names that are honored will be Hayek, Popper, Friedman, Orwell and Rand. .

The sheer length of her two masterworks, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, makes rereading them a pretty daunting prospect. They tend to be a little too hysterical, a little too repetitive and, with the end of the Cold War, they've lost a little of their edge. But only a little, her essential message is still as important and timely today as it was fifty years ago--the only guarantee of freedom and human progress continues to be the individual acting in his own interest. Every attempt to make one person work for another's benefit erodes all of our liberty and retards our progress as a society and a species. So I highly recommend that you return to these shorter works and The Fountainhead stands up pretty well. It also looks, from the reviews below, like her collected letters and journals make for rewarding reading. This fine short novel is an excellent introduction to her passionate political philosophy and her emotional polemical style.

GRADE: A

Rating:
Summary: A Shocking Tale of Development of Future Government
Review: ANTHEM is one of the best books that I've ever read. It is a short read, only 123 pages, but it is loaded with amazing and unique ideas developed by Ayn Rand. The most shocking thing about this book is the use of the word "we", and it's power. It really makes one think, dream, and believe how modern issues can lead to such a government as the one in this book; a government of "equality" , "freedom" and "human rights"... so they say. Anyhow, this is a terrific book and anyone in the right mind should read it.

Rating:
Summary: Anthem, a book about not being individual
Review: I thought the book was really good. It starts out with a guy named Equality 7-2521. He goes to school at age 5 until he is 15. Then he becomes a streetsweeper. The society he lives in taught him that he is nothing and that the society or a "we" as they put it n the book, is everything. One day while streetsweeping he sees a girl named Liberty 5-3000, and he falls in love with her, and nicknames her "the golden one." Another day he finds a cave thing, and goes inside and finds wire and discovers electricity and goes to show it to the great council, but they don't like it and they want to lock him up so he runsaway to the forest and Liberty 5-3000 follows him. So then he is out in the middle of no where and find a house and it's full of books and he learns about the past. And that's it.

Rating:
Summary: Ladies and gentlemen, we have tripe.
Review: Bad. Bad. Bad. This being the only thing I've read of Ayn Rand's, I have a very low opinion of her. The writing, and the ideas expressed in this book are overly simplistic. It all comes off as an very poorly. I know that everybody raves about how wonderful Ayn Rand is, but if this is an indication of her work, I think it would be just as well to skip her all together. There are plenty of other anti-socialist novels out there; many of which are far better.

Rating:
Summary: This may have been groundbreaking 70 years ago, ...
Review:
but if an unknown author wrote this today it would be derided by everyone who read it (and that wouldn't be very many because it would never get published) as boring, simplistic, passe and irrelevent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, ... the evils of collectivism, the Borg, socialism is bad, individuality rocks, yadda yadda, been there, done that.

The story itself is basic individual v. collective ending in a 10-page social/political diatribe by the author. The politics of it were no doubt relevent to a communist exile 70 years ago, but are pretty corny to a 21st century American.

So, my review is not a knock on Ayn Rand. The story was probably new, exciting and relevent when she wrote it. But unless a reader has had their head in a hole for a long time I can't see how this book will make much of an impression.


Rating:
Summary: An interesting point of view, but...
Review: I tend to think that the society in Anthem is able to be viewed as having arisen from any number of current societal structures (corporate or socialist both included). I tend to think the unthinking flag waving patriotism since 911 (or any such disaster) tends to show the first trends toward this.

I tend to think that we won't go so far as just being named by number and losing the word "I". I do think that we will get to the non-thinking blind allegiance to the state over several decades if we are not careful.

I think Rand makes the mistake of thinking that the individual can solve all. There are times that people have to work together (application of learning to generate new knowledge seems to work this way). I tend to think her version of individualism goes too far.

All in all a very interesting and profound (and easy to read) book that will make you think no matter your political perspective.

Rating:
Summary: TZ's review...
Review: This book was outstanding, masterfully written with a view of a virtual world where the mindset of individuality as a way of life. At the time I read this book I had read approximately 60 to 70 books in a 4 month period. The affect this book had on me was so extremely profound, I found myself reading it again. I recommend this book as a welcome change in subject matter.