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Ayn Rand And The World She Made (2009)

by Anne C. Heller(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0385513992 (ISBN13: 9780385513999)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Nan A. Talese

review 1: Paints the story of a brilliant yet flawed intellectual devoted to spreading the word on objectivism and free market capitalism I her passionate defense of the individual. Heller gives interesting insight into the ideas and late night discussions that gave voice to the characters of Rand's novels and the battle against repression and altruism they fight. Thought provoking reviews of Rand's novels and essays come along for the ride as well. The book pulls no punches in the brutal portrayal of Rand as a ego centric control freak who saw no one but her cult like following inner clique as even having a chance of being worthy of existence. She left relationships and marriages in wreckage in her wake as she epitomized the self centered life she glori... morefied.
review 2: Love her or hate her, Ayn Rand has been a towering figure in American literature since "The Fountainhead" appeared in 1943. Amid today's renewed interest in libertarian philosophy & a worship of Rand by many conservatives, Anne Heller's relevant biography gives us the woman behind what has become a cult figure. Brilliant, driven, impatient, judgmental, domineering, sexually aggressive, suspicious to the point of paranoia -- all these terms can be applied to her at some point in her life. Almost entirely a creature of her own making, she arrived in America in 1926 as a Russian Jewish immigrant with little English, renamed herself & began her relentless climb, starting as an extra in a Cecil B. DeMille epic & later becoming a screenwriter, a playwright with a Broadway hit, & finally a best-selling novelist & a thinker who influenced a generation of acolytes, including Alan Greenspan, a future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Influential though they are, her novels are undeniably talky & melodramatic. (The Hollywood version of "The Fountainhead," in my opinion, has the distinction of being the best bad movie ever made.) Her private life, including her unconventional marriage to Frank O'Connor, her 14-year affair with Nathaniel Branden, who was 25 years younger, & her need to control every detail of her followers' lives, has a bizarre fascination. This is a masterful biography. less

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