Customer Reviews

Atlas Shrugged (Centennial Ed. HC)

5 star:		(693)
4 star:		(160)
3 star:		(99)
2 star:		(92)
1 star:		(137)

 

 

This edition of the book is not too great. The font is too small and the pages are hard to open, so I would recommend buying another version of the book.

I found the opinions expressed through Ayn Rands persuasive writing to be very interesting. Even when i disagreed will her philosophy, I was still thankful for her thought inspiring arguments, for causing me to doubt my own beliefs. Overall I found this to be a great read for any philosophical mind.

Extroidinary literature but may not be the place to start if you are not acquainted with Ayn Rand.

Anyway, after reading many of the reviews, I have noticed that even the people who loved the book have an erroneous idea of what Ayn Rand was saying.

First of all, ethically selfishness or self-interest means you have a right to your own life, that you own it and can dispose of it as you want, without imposing force on others. It does not mean you have the right TO DO ANYTHING YOU WANT OR TO IMPOSE YOURSELF ON OTHERS. It means you own your life, and are free to live it in the manner you deem right for yourself. In a political context, it means the government is prohibited from imposing itself on your life, by for example drafting you into the military, or prohibiting you from entering a certain career field.

When Ayn Rand attacked altruism and its component part self-sacrifice SHE WAS NOT ATTACKING HELPING OTHERS, OR DOING GOOD THINGS FOR OTHERS, OR BENEVOLENTLY SPREADING GOOD WILL IN THE WORLD. What she was attacking was the fundamental principle of altruism that YOUR LIFE BELONGS TO OTHERS AND CAN BE DISPOSED OF WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT.

We see the consequences of altruism all over the world. People living without the ability to own their lives. Cuba is a prime example. The communist party and Fidel Castro are the owners of everyone's life. They control and direct it with impunity. One has little or no control.

Helping others and spreading good will is as much a part of successful living as living and breathing, but when people are FORCED to sacrifice their lives in the name of helping others, state coercion follows, and this is the evil, Ayn Rand so eloquently refers to in Atlas Shrugged and her other writing.

Yes, this is a classic work and valuable primarily as a presentation of Ayn Rand's Philosphophy of Objectivism. It's a pretty good presentation of how life might look and feel if you were to eliminate all subjective and emotional human responses to life and more importantly create a government that only minimally intrudes upon those thinkers, inventors and producers who utilize capitalism to its most efficient ends.

In fact, I think that's why it does a good job of what's it "objectively" sets out to do. As evidenced by the myriad of reviews all over the map, it achieves its goal by spurring thought and evaluation of the philosophy of objectivism and more importantly what the balance must be between individualism and the corporate needs of society and the role of government in balancing them.

As a novel, it is long, it rambles and it could use some editing. But then again, that's a "subjective evaluation" and who is to say that the philosophy itself does not render it to be as it is.

I know many come to this work as required reading and as the audience is young there tends to be a pretty strong reaction to the content of the philosophy, either setting aside all idealism or embracing the cold, hard automaton thinking of the protagonist Rand creates.

In fact, I think reality lies between those two extremes. There is much to be said in favor of Rand's conclusions coming from a totalitarian idealistic Soviet Union that causes her to react so strongly against it and advocate an austere personal capitalism. In fact, she does such a good job, that I think she creates a whiplash at the end of the book that drives people back toward the center, seeking desperately for something, anything, that offeres solace and relief from the stark world she paints with little of the milk of human kindness and care for one's fellow man beyond that which is necessary for one's own self-interest to be preserved.

This is a very important book and a very influential one. I read it later in life to see what all the fuss was about. I walked away from it changed and better able to use my mind to evaluate the value of well intentioned social engineering and what it does to the opposite end of the spectrum. In the end, I tend to hear the warning against tipping too far in this direction, but I also appreciate the perhaps unintentional opposite warning of neglecting this area. The question that must be answered is how much is enough and by what means, especially by means of a coersive government, must this be accomplished.

Regardless of what perspective you come to this book already holding, chances are you'll be brought face to face with the harsh reality that Rand and her objectivism paints and you'll walk away with some modified views and possibly even some new values and a foundation to build further your own views.

I think we can agree that that experience is a worthwhile one, even if the panoply of differing opinions attached to the book gives evidence of the controversial nature of the core message.

I couldn't put this book down. Ayn Rand is/was a wonderful writer and she managed to put her political beliefs into an excellent love/mystery story. Those on the left are likely to rate this book poorly because Ms Rand has her own ideas having been through the revolution in Russia. Read the book and come to your own conclusions. For me it was a page turner. Good thing because it is a long book.

This is a pro capitalist book and she does not mention anything about the destruction of Earth. Greed is a virtue to the author.

The detail is way over the top. She develops a few good characters, but goes on and on about their personalities until you want to scream, "Enough all ready."

Atlas Shrugged audiobook was much better than the actual movie. The reader was phenomenal. The philosophy behind Atlas Shrugged cam through loud and clear and impacted me profoundly. Even though my worldview about the government, taxes, and the political machinery had been similar, I now started to notice similarities among friends and family members. The use of guilt, apologies only when there are ulterior motives etc. Very opening. This should be required reading (or listening to everyone)!!!

With more than a thousand reviews already online, it may not accomplish much to add one more, but I will try. (SPOILER ALERT)

I have read through all the one-star reviews, and I see three broad themes.

1) Rand's ideas are morally objectionable, false, and anyway not original to her.

2) The novel is too long, too abstractly intellectual, and its characters are not realistic or believable.

3) The tone of the writing is angry, belligerent, and filled with hate.

I want to address this third point, which I think is the most damaging and contentious. Greg Nyquist says the book exhibits 'furious, unbridled hatred towards those who do not agree' and that Rand 'desired some kind of awful punishment to be visited' on them. Others say similar things.

Leaving aside for the moment whether this charge is true, even partially, of Atlas Shrugged, it is not true of any of Rand's other novels. No one reading Anthem or The Fountainhead or We The Living comes away thinking that Rand hates her readers, or even just those readers who disagree with her. It is not an essential part of Rand's fiction-writing style to project angry hatred of those who disagree.

There are long stretches in Atlas Shrugged that resemble Rand's earlier work in that she is just describing the action -- Dagny's childhood, or the development of Rearden Metal, or the various political crises and how Taggart Transcontinental must cope with them. For a reader to feel hated when reading these passages means identifying in a personal way with the villains. Some people do manage to do this. Whitaker Chambers, a hardline Communist who later got religion, famously wrote that "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard commanding, from painful necessity: 'To a gas chamber, go!'" He obviously felt very threatened. But most of us do not have personal histories that closely parallel Rand villains.

I think there is a point in the novel where it is possible for the disbelieving reader to feel angrily confronted by Rand, even hated. It is in the final chapters, as events reach a climax, and particularly when John Galt gives his radio speech.

The problem is that the strikers, the men of the mind, are deliberately letting civilization collapse. They know it will mean mass deaths. They also know that those they are leaving behind are not all equally guilty. Many plainly do not understand the issue. Galt's speech is the first opportunity for most of the general public to know what is at stake, why their society is breaking down.

There is just no way for this speech not to project hostility. Galt is meant to be a perfect man, and the speech he gives is like God condemning sinners. He is telling millions of people that they have failed morally and intellectually, that they have let their world be poisoned by bad ideas, and that many of them are going to die as a consequence. He is saying that he could save them, but he won't. If you the reader are in any doubt about the need for the strike, this is a very unpleasant resolution of the plot. Even if you're in agreement with the strikers, it is uncomfortable reading. The tragic fate of Eddie Willers, a highly sympathetic character, has haunted even Rand's admirers.

Now here is the tricky bit, which many of Rand's critics and even some of her admirers just don't seem to get. The book is FICTION. Rand did not actually advocate letting civilization collapse, much less doing it just to punish people she disagreed with. Many of the things John Galt says are meant to carry over into real life, as part of Rand's philosophy. Condemning millions to starvation and death to 'teach them a lesson' is not one of them.

This brings us back to that other complaint about Rand, that her characters are one-dimensional, that her villains are nothing but bad and the heroes are nothing but good, and that her writing is much too ponderous, spelling out every implication over and over. This fails to take into account the very risky and difficult premise of the novel. Critics condemn Rand for understanding her own project. The story is going to end in the deliberate destruction and rebirth of civilization. The villains have to be intensely, vividly, massively bad for the story to make any sense at all. It has to be clear that there is no alternative, that the society the heroes are living in cannot be fixed any other way. Rand worked very hard at making her villains awful and their world irredeemable. But she did grasp the distinction between the world she invented and the world we all live in.

Rand was capable of writing nuanced, realistic, complex characters, such as Kira's family in We The Living. She was capable of writing about characters who grew and changed, like Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Rearden's inner struggle is meant to relieve some of the starkness of the struggle in AS. The reader can identify with him, more than with the other heroes. But it would be a literary atrocity to have a collection of nothing but nuanced, ambiguous heroes and nuanced, ambiguous villains, struggling to discover the meaning of life for 1,000 pages, and then for the heroes to destroy civilization to get rid of the villains.

In other words, if the reader senses an angry, stark, dogmatic 'vibe' in Atlas Shrugged, there are well-founded reasons for it. The literary integrity of the work requires it. It may not be to everyone's taste, but it is also not quite the gratuitous, involuntary expression of intellectual incompetence and/or mental illness that Rand's critics want to make it out to be.

Ayn Rand's excruciatingly long diatribe on how the vast majority of the world is mooching off a few talented people (called the prime movers). She creates these god like beings who, despite the books insistence on them being perfectly rational, go about doing and thinking absurd things.

The climax of absurdity is when we discover the secret utopian valley of these prime movers. These men are so hard working and brilliant that they are able to do the work of hundreds of men in a six hour work day. Ayn Rand's theory of art is said to be that of "romantic realism", she tends more towards romance then realism.

Second only to this in absurdity is where the heroine, Dagny, shoots a man for being indecisive. Given that Rand goes on about the need for a rational basis for morality this struck me as more then hypocritical.

Other interesting aspects: Insistence on a gold standard, desire for the complete abolition of taxes , and the world wide domination of communism. The "proof" of all these things was reported, by Dagny, to be in John Galts 5000 page(at least that's how long it seemed) speech. I dare anyone to find anything resembling a proof proving Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Atlas Shrugged will appeal only to those as deluded and narcissistic as Ayn Rand..

and you may very well die of boredom too after you wade through this hyperverbous book.
It was such a disappointment. Having read the Fountain Head, I had expectations of a good story and solid characters, instead it was one loopty loop after another and boring from the get-go to the long, long awaited end.
If you are a fan of politics and boring books, this is the one for you.