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LETTERS OF AYN RAND

These letters by novelist (The Fountainhead, not reviewed, etc.), political thinker, and all-around, self-described ``intellectual egotist'' Rand (190582) prove oddly revealing of their peculiar, indomitable author. Berliner, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has done an admirable job of assembling and editing Rand's letters (though her correspondents' replies are mostly absent); his commentary seems quite judicious, as well. These letters maintain a uniformly strident tone. Whether advancing her career through flattery and opportunism by writing to Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other notables, or advancing an ersatz philosophy—``Objectivism''—constructed out of anti-communist bromides and specious ratiocination, Rand crafts bracing prose. Most letters concern business in New York and Hollywood, the struggle against ``collectivism,'' and the maintenance of a growing group of fans. Rand often appears almost comically heartless. ``Altruism is the curse of the world,'' she aphorizes early on. Of aesthetic matters she seems insensible. Would-be writers receive banal exhortations to focus on plot and character, and reflections on her novels make them sound more one-dimensional than they are. A steady undercurrent of real pathos flows through this book, however: Rand describes the necessity to exercise self-censorship when writing letters (since lost) to her family, who were suffering tragically under dictatorship in her native Russia. If Rand developed her own authoritarianism, she did so in protective reaction to Stalinism. In her old age, she turns down an opportunity to write on the theme ``the childhood day I will always remember,'' because, she writes, ``what I regard as significant are certain trends and intellectual developments in my childhood, but not single days or events.'' Such chilling passages suggest that the terror which robbed her of her childhood and her family blighted her sensibility as well. Objectivists will find much reinforcement in this volume; more objective readers may find it truly depressing.

Pub Date: June 12, 1995

ISBN: 0-525-93946-6

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

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

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