(Oxford, 369 pages, $27.95)
It’s about time someone wrote a “thorough and largely unbiased” biography of one of 20th-century America’s most influential political thinkers, said Brian Doherty in Reason. Many books have been written about Ayn Rand, both by personal friends and “bitter enemies” of the controversial novelist and self-declared “radical for capitalism.” But this work, by “a serious American academic,” is smart and fair. It also often reads like fiction, said Nick Gillespie in The Wilson Quarterly. As Jennifer Burns tells it, the life of the woman who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged was even “more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted” than the novels’ wild plots.
Rand was indeed an “intensely odd” woman, said Sam Anderson in New York. Born Alissa Rosenbaum into a Jewish family in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, she was 12 when Bolshevik soldiers seized her father’s dentistry business and drove the family into exile. Collectivism became her enemy. At 21, a “willful and brilliant loner” chasing her own star, she moved to America, changed her name, and launched a career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In 1943, with the publication of The Fountainhead, she struck it rich. Soon she would attract a circle of believers who admired her glorification of life’s high achievers and disdain for its also-rans. “Proud, grouchy, vindictive,” and improbably charming, she publicly seemed “a machine of pure reason” who never lost a political argument. The more you learn about her, though, the more her “home-brewed” philosophy looks like a projection of her idiosyncratic temperament.
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Rand’s anti-totalitarianism bred a subculture around her that “came to resemble a Soviet state in miniature,” said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. Rand asked her followers to regard her as a goddess of intellect, and frequently exploited them emotionally—and sexually. Though “possessed of looks that could be charitably described as unusual,” she persuaded a married acolyte 25 years her junior to join her in a long-term sexual relationship. She even coaxed the spurned spouse into accepting it. Rand’s philosophy may still live on in the hearts of many Americans. But, among her immediate circle of followers, that philosophic system seems to have fallen short “for the same reason communism failed”: It asked people to live in a way that didn’t come naturally.
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feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”