Review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand is an exceptional, albeit highly ideological, storyteller and Atlas Shrugged is her final achievement. The characters are vibrant, the plot complex, and the work deserves a reading from those who seek to understand the misguided underpinnings of today’s libertarian movement.
I especially enjoy Rand’s descriptions of facial expressions and inner emotional struggles and visceral reactions as her characters face adversity or conspire to leech of the productive members of society until they are bled dry. The book is mostly dialogue, but it is masterfully done and every word reveals something about a character, or about what Rand is trying to say about her worldview.
The leading protagonist is a woman, an improvement upon her earlier novel The Fountainhead whose female characters paled in comparison to the heroic men. Dagny Taggart is the equivalent of today’s Sheryl Sandberg, doing the hard work of running a leading company under the shadow of a more famous but less capable man. She is smart, hardworking, and determined to contribute to society by running the best railroad in the country.
The premise of Atlas Shrugged is that a few excellent people provide the economic livelihood of the world and the rest of us should get out of their way. Rand’s “men of the mind” are reminiscent of Frederick Nietzsche’s Overman in Thus Spoke…
