Authors: Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
ISBN-13: 9780451191137, ISBN-10: 0451191137
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: March 1996
Edition: 50th Anniversary Edition
Ayn Rand is one of the rare writers who not only drew in readers with her novels, but created a philosophical movement with them. Her seminal Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, cornerstones of her individualistic Objectivist world view, can be viewed as literature, self-empowerment texts, or both.
The year 2005 marks Ayn Rand’s Centennial Year. Ayn Rand’s classic tale of a future dark age of the great “We”—a world that deprives individuals of name, independence, and values—anticipates her later masterpieces, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
The difference between this long-forgotten exercise in paranoia and other futuristic visions of a world controlled by the state, such as Aldous Huxley's or George Orwell's, is the extremist tone of Rand's story. The author lived in a black-and-white world in which things social or communal are evil and things individual and selfish are exalted. This "anthem" culminates in a hymn to the concepts of "I" and "ego," where the rebels are those who resist group action; the oppressors are government officials and others who attempt to provide a safety net for the less fortunate. The production is not improved by the theatricality of narrator Paul Meier, which is reminiscent of a ham Victorian actor intoning an overwrought melodrama. Not recommended.-Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, NC