Customer Reviews

The Passion of Ayn Rand

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

During the 60's and 70's, Ayn Rand lead the Objectivist philosophical movement that she founded through her writings, most notably Atlas Shrugged and the Virtue of Selfishness. Her lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston were yearly sold-out events. Her philosophy of objective reason over emotion and feelings, of self-reliance and the natural rights of the able were in stark contrast to the competing liberal movements during the wild ferment of the 60's and 70's.

Among her closest disciples were Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. Nathaniel, a much younger, brilliant psychologist was her choice as intellectual heir. And something more... Barbara Branden, Nathaniel's wife at the time, wrote what she later repudiated as a puff-piece biography of Rand. After many years Barbara Branden went back and wrote a fuller, more human biography with details she was able to glean from the normally reticent Rand, who edited away her past as so much irrelevant junk. Even Rand's name is a nom de guerre taken in part from her Remington-Rand typewriter. And Barbara also included the controversial and frankly sad aspects of Rand's life as well.

One incident in the book points to Rand's complexity and inflexibility. She was a lifelong smoker. She would often say that statistics prove nothing; that even if statistics say that smoking could cause cancer it says nothing about if YOU will get cancer, which of course is true. Ironically, Rand contracted lung cancer, however she refused to amend her outspoken opinion on smoking even on her deathbed.

This book is a rare glimpse of a complicated genius from an insider's point of view. Barbara wasn't just a bystander, she was a participant in the almost larger-than-life drama that surrounded Ayn Rand. Rand attempted to live as the characters in her novels, with sometimes disastrous results. Barbara does an admirable job of writing about Rand, without rancor but without glossing over some of the more unsavory aspects of Rand's life. At the same time, she acknowledges Rand's greatness. Not everyone is happy with Barbara Branden's version of Rand's life, but if you are at all interested in the writings and the woman, you must read this unique and valuable work.

I am currently a law student who has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. I have spent much of my adult life studying Objectivism and integrating many of its principles into my life. I am not an "Objectivist," but I do consider myself a student of the philosophy.

This book is not a fanatical denouncement of Rand, as some of the reviewers giving it a 1 star have claimed. Those that have read this book and have calmly reflected upon it, have absolutely no valid justification in giving it a 1. The author points out her own experiences with Ms. Rand, and gives her own interpretation as to Ms. Rand's psychology. The overall feeling of the book towards Ms. Rand is one of honest admiration, sincere fondness, and regretful sorrow. The theme throughout the book is that Ms. Rand struggled, achieved profound success, and experienced deep tragedy.

Persons giving this book a 5 star rating, then going on to attack Ms. Rand's philosophy are despicably dishonest. The author's treatment of Objectivism is very positive. The only objections she has towards the philosophy are some of its applications to psychology (regarding free will and the origin of emotions). The author only really denounces the minority of individuals in the Objectivist movement that lack independence. If you want to understand Objectivism, read and think for yourself. But do not understand it through this biography, or the weak context-dropping reviews on this site. I suggest starting with some of the fiction if you aren't familiar with philosophy or the non-fiction if you are (either way, read the fiction eventually!) Then judge for yourself whether this philosophy is a great, complex, and powerful achievement, with positive practical application to all realms of man's life, or whether it is the 'over simplification' which the pseudo-intellectuals ramble on about in their reviews.

I give this book a 4 because it doesn't adequately discuss Objectivism, which is central to understanding Ayn Rand. The author does make clear that any claimed problems in Ms. Rand's psychology were not a result of Objectivism, or vice versa. Ms. Rand was a great woman that gave to this world amazing works of fiction, and a philosophy which has already significantly impacted our culture. I do not know if everything said is correctly interpreted, or if every relevant context was given, but I do not believe that the author was being dishonest. If you want to get an inside look at Ms. Rand, read this book, and make sure to read some other sources too. Do not judge her philosophy based on your conclusion on this book, and do not judge her completely based just on what you have read in this book.

Barbara Branden was associated with Ayn Rand from 1950 until 1968, when she and her husband had their tragic split with Rand. In 1986, she published this biography of Rand. In light of the split between the Brandens and Rand, I don't think anyone would claim that this is the "last word" on Rand. Yet it is a well researched biography based on approximately 200 interviews of people who knew Rand at various times in her life. Branden also interviewed Rand extensively before their split.

Unfortunately, Branden didn't have access to Rand's papers, nor was she able to interview some of those who knew Rand best from the time of the split until Rand's death in 1982.

For reasons I've discussed on the web, I don't think James Valliant and others have undercut the description of Rand presented here.

If you wish to continue hero worship or hatred of Ayn Rand, don't read this book. If you want a balanced view of this great Philosopher and Writer, it is a must read. I made an important decision after reading this book. I took my copies of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" and donated them to a local library. It gave me closure. It is a happy ending to the story that psychologist Nathaniel Branden was to go on professionally and evolve beyond Objectivism. He puts out an excellent tape called "The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand." All praise to Barbara Branden for this book. Highly recommend reading Nathaniel Branden's "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem," his opus. Enjoy hearing the good parts of Objectivism combined with an understanding of human emotion in that book.

This is an excellent, literary, balanced biography.

Barbara Branden gives the reader a detailed look at the real life behind the romantic fiction of Ayn Rand, beginning with Rand's youth in Russia and her struggles as an immigrant to the US in the 1920's.

Branden lauds the virtue, insight, and intellect of this powerful novelist while also providing an "insider's perspective" into Rand's personal life and illuminating its triumphs and tragedies.

Anyone interested in Rand's works,whether a proponent or opponent of her philosophy, will find this biography a fascinating must-read.

I had read several of Rand's works and interestingly enough began with the non-fiction ones. I saw the movie on TV and thought it failed completely in presenting her revolutionary ideas. The movie centered (of course) on the odd affair between Rand and her first disciple, Nathaniel Brandon with both his wife's and Rand's husband knowledge and acceptance.

The book, though, goes into detail that the movie could not. It explains ideas and thoughts and though processess that no film could ever portray. We read about a young refugee from Soviet Russia escaping to the one country that offered unlimited freedom. There has always been disagreement over whether our attitudes are born with us or developed by life experiences. In Rand's case, it appears she was born this way, displaying an odd, rampant individualism from an early age.

We see her struggles, her marriage to Frank, her first failures as an author before the one great break - THE FOUNTAINHEAD which is still, in my opinion, the best. (The portrayal of Gail is simply unsurpassable.) We meet Nathaniel and the growing group of worshipers. Unlike others, I do not entirely blame Rand for this reaction - she accepted what others offered, a very human emotion.

At some point she decided that she wanted the young follower so they had an affair which degraded everyone involved. During this time she wrote THE book, ATLAS SHRUGGED, and reveled in its success. Surprisingly, despite her accent, appearance, domineering personality and rejection by the intellecutal left she became a much coveted speaker, particularly for theoretical subjects. Above all, she was a woman of ideas whose first concern was promulgating those ideas.

She has been attacked because she was demanding, for an affair, for a discrepancy between her public ideas and her private life. All are true but her popularity rests on her so-called philosophy which is, in its essence, the slogan of REASON magazine..."Free markets, free minds." She espoused freedom and attacked collectivism in all its many variants - Naziism, Communism, Socialism, tribalism and religion. It was her espousal of capitalism and individualism that set her at odds with the "progressive" artistic world and, simultaneously, made her such a hit with "ordinary" people. A remarkable book for an even more remarkable life.

I first read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" when I was 16. It had a profound influence on me and I went on to read all of her published works. In one essay, Rand wrote a brief "P.S." at the end, stating that Nathaniel Branden was no longer assoctiated with her or her philosophy. Given that she had proclaimed Nathaniel her closest associate in the Objectivism movement, it was all the more puzzling that she never explained why the break. This books explains why. It details some of the dark side of Rand's philosophy - the rationalizations of Rand, the unquestioning (read, unthinking) loyalty of some of her followers, but much of it praises Rand's philosophy and sense of life.

The memoirs/biographies of Barbara and Nathaniel Branden are musts for anyone seriously interested in Ayn Rand and her work. This is my "two-fer" review of both books, which should be read together.

The young Brandens' encounter with Rand was the most important experience of their lives. Her force of personality and formidable intellectual powers pulled them into a strange menage-a-quatre with Rand and her husband, Frank O'Connor, even as the Brandens launched the Objectivist movement. Both of them came away simultaneously transformed by Objectivism and personally disillusioned with Rand. The Branden-Rand break caused Rand great pain (disguised as moral indignation) and led to the almost-total isolation of her final years. The picture that emerges from both books is that of a woman caught in a self-created storybook world, eager for the companionship of equals, obsessed with control, unwilling to meet the world except on nearly impossible terms, trying to break out of her emotional-sexual prison -- then rejected by the smart and ambitious man twenty-five years her junior who had made her the center of an explosive and influential movement but who also discovered his need to lead his own life and make his own mark.

Barbara Branden's book is mostly biography and marked the first step towards an objective judgment of Rand. The Passion of Ayn Rand is detached and wistful, while Judgment Day is an aggressive, sometimes painfully honest, memoir. Nathaniel Branden was still wrestling with himself when he wrote it. He recounts with pride how he emerged, wounded but intact, from his break with Rand and how his experience as both guru and victim of a cult-like movement affected his later work in psychology. On the other hand, The Passion of Ayn Rand projects no sense of struggle. Barbara Branden deftly and quietly identifies aspects of Rand's psychology that started at a young age and became more pronounced after she finished Atlas Shrugged: her extreme positive and negative idealizations of other people, her habits of "editing" reality and rewriting history, her emotional repression and consequent angry outbursts. Nathaniel Branden traces how these tendencies spun themselves out in Rand's novels, her philosophy, and the movement he created. Rand's lack of self-knowledge extracted a steep price. Of such stuff are cults made, he concludes.

Fortunately, most people come to Rand by reading her books, not through the official Objectivist movement that she authorized, her attempt at complete control of her reputation, even beyond the grave. But it won't do, as many followers think, to accept her novels and philosophy while eschewing the official Ayn Rand cult. The complete Rand, both person and work, needs independent examination. The sledgehammer moralizing and Platonizing tendencies of her fiction are inescapable flaws of not just her personality, but her novels and philosophy. The extremes of emotional repression to which she subjected herself would have done in a person of lesser willpower, but she expected those who came to her to similarly contort themselves and to subordinate their own judgment to hers. A powerful, independent mind like Nathaniel Branden's could do this only for so long. The isolation and decline of her last decade were a result of the same determined willpower that made her novels possible. It also kept Rand and her followers from seeing her philosophical views as a flawed starting outline of a philosophy, hardly a complete system, and sprinkled with unproven assertions ("benevolent universe," "all problems solvable by reason," "existence = identity," etc., permeated by conceptual sleights of hand and her confusion of consistency with completeness and necessity).

These tendencies have had bad consequences for the Rand-inspired libertarian and Objectivist movements. They drove an unnecessary wedge between herself and conservatives. Her obsession with control and self-isolation prevented her from seeing the right arguments for a free society (no one can plan or control society or history or should pretend to) and led to her isolation from potential secular allies like Hayek, Popper, and Friedman. Emotional repression leads to disowning the self that in turn creates alienation from others. Are these not the very tendencies that libertarians suffer from and which seriously impair their ability to influence politics? Conservatives have gotten much further, not because of religion, but because they do not practice emotional repression or repudiate human nature. Rand's followers continue to hobble themselves with her faulty "psychoepistemology" that reduces thinking to conceptual abstraction and people to ideas. It's what made her think that John Galt and Dagny Taggart could be real people and not the allegories they so obviously are. Rand's impossible ideal was humans as self-creating gods, with their minds and lives fully subject to volitional control. For this reason, she rejected religion. But she nearly rejected evolution as well, because it implies that we are all subject to super-individual and unconscious forces, albeit wholly natural ones. Nothing was to interfere with Rand's fantasy of control -- that was her passion and her tragedy.

POSTSCRIPT: The 1990s saw new, important critical work on Rand and her writings. They constitute an excellent start for interested readers, once they've digested the Brandens' memoirs. Start with the official exposition in Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Then move on to the best of the sympathetic criticism:

- The Ideas of Ayn Rand, Ronald Merrill
- The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, eds. Douglas Den Uyl & Douglas Rasmussen
- The Ayn Rand Companion (2nd ed., The New Ayn Rand Companion), Mimi Gladstein
- Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, Chris Matthew Sciabarra (a wealth of historical and biographical information giving Rand's ideas their full context - flawed thesis, but the most thorough scholarly treatment so far)

Even a major book like Sciabarra's only scratches the surface. Rand's allegorizing tendencies are linked to her rejection of her Russian childhood, but also to a thread in Russian literature (traceable, through Christianity, back to Plato) that views persons as embodiments of ideas (e.g., Dostoevsky). The style of her fiction can be viewed as "individualist realism," in opposition to the much cruder "socialist realism" popular in the 1930s and enforced in Soviet Russia. Rand's knee-jerk hostility to religion needs a fresh perspective in light of the mysticism of Orthodox Russia. Comparing Rand to other Russian refugees (like her contemporary and fellow Petersbergians Nabokov and Berberova) would be fascinating. (Russia's exit from the never-never land of Marxism has allowed rediscovery of its real history.) Someone should fully identify the influence of Nietzsche she supposedly outgrew with The Fountainhead. The Nietzschean "lone wolf" mentality clung to her and her work to the very end. Neither Rand nor her followers have ever produced a coherent theory of society. Neither did Nietzsche, but he knew himself well enough to reject movements, politics, and systematizing. Rand did not, and an intellectually sterile cult was the result.

Rand constructed her philosophical beliefs to force the conclusions she wanted - this is obvious in her esthetic views, but it also holds in the rest. Attempts to repair and complete her philosophy lead back to the standard Enlightenment mix of natural rights, utilitarianism, and historical analogy, with Aristotle as one intellectual ancestor among others. These theories remain the backbone of existing conservative and classical liberal thought, at least in the English-speaking world. Could such an exercise lead to anything else?

The hostile reviews on Amazon of the Brandens' books only provide more evidence of the mind-warping effects of cultism on nominally intelligent people. A pathetic recent attack on the Brandens falls into the same category. I could tell you not to read them -- but you should, so you can see what cults are like.

Unlike the fawning bios by Ayn Rand "disciples", this bio gives you a fair and balanced story of the life of Ayn Rand. Instead of presenting her as some super-guru and putting her on a high pedestal, this shows her in all her humanity, and shows that Rand, like the rest of us, was just as fallible, just as irrational. She was cruel as well as kind, rational as well as wildly irrational. Good as well as bad.

Branden did a fabulous job at writing Rand's story.

Highly recommended - especially for those Rand fans who refuse to see that Ayn Rand was first and foremost a human being.

A lot has been written about this book, and I'm not inclined to add much to the discussion. For whatever its flaws, it remains the only full-length biographical study of Ayn Rand. Barbara Branden's perspective as an insider who knew Rand better than almost anyone else has its advantages, but also its drawbacks.

Two biographical studies of Rand are due this year, one by Anne Heller and another by Jennifer Burns.