AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

Name: AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE
Author: Anne C. Heller
ISBN: 978-0-385-51399-9

by Anne C. Heller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2009

A treatment sometimes vitiated by the author’s affection for her subject, but the most thorough we’re likely to see until...

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The long career and cluttered personal life of the writer who said she owed no philosophical debts to anyone but Aristotle.

In her debut, magazine journalist and editor Heller calls herself a “strong admirer” of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), who was born in Russia as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. “Ayn” (rhymes with “mine”) was her father’s nickname for her; no one knows the source of “Rand.” Heller’s admiration is most evident in her diction—throughout, she employs terms like “breathtaking” and “farsighted and brave”—but because she is not purely partisan, she was denied access to the Ayn Rand archives. Still, the author’s research is formidable—her endnotes cover more than 100 pages—and she ably highlights the hues of Rand’s dark side(s). The founder of the philosophy of Objectivism and author of perennial bestsellers The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) could be petty, vindictive, disingenuous, deceptive and profoundly needy. She frequently quoted her characters as if they were real, and she maintained a secret sexual relationship with the much younger Nathaniel Branden, who was her designated financial and intellectual heir until he betrayed her for a younger woman. Heller spends a large portion of the narrative following the arc of the Branden relationship (he was married, as well), and its complexities and intensities ultimately became pathetic and wearisome. Heller examines Rand’s Russian girlhood (she was a brilliant loner), her emigration and arrival in New York City, her sojourns in Hollywood—where she worked on screenplays and met future husband, actor Frank O’Connor—her struggles to write her massive novels and her battles with the Left. However, the author never convincingly explains Rand’s powerful personal magnetism.

A treatment sometimes vitiated by the author’s affection for her subject, but the most thorough we’re likely to see until Rand’s papers become more accessible.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-51399-9

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)