Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Five stars, one star. Five stars, one star. Over and over the same pattern. Seems as humans, we're evenly divided into two camps: those who think everything is fundamentally simple, and those who think things are complex and interrelated. If you're a member of the former camp - the "right vs. wrong," "good vs. evil," "us vs. them" set - you'll probably enjoy Atlas Shrugged; you'll think Rand tells it like it is and you'll like her powerful writing style too. Thank you for reading my review, and enjoy the book. But if you're a member of the latter camp - if you value subtlety, insight, complex characters, a believable plot, and thought-provoking dialogue - then RUN from Ayn Rand. Unless you're researching how the "us vs. them" crowd thinks, in which case you should stock up on Tylenol first. To read Rand is to have the sensation of someone pounding on your forehead with a hammer. Penguin Putnam ought to attach a medal to the inside back cover as a reward to anyone who made it through the book. I know I wanted one. Full review follows: Non-ideologues and those attempting to read Atlas as literature and not as a political doctrine are almost certain to be disappointed by the book. It fails for sheer lack of merit. Its characters, while colorfully imagined, are not provided with distinctive voices. One sounds much like another - strident, tendentious, and monothematic. Sentences run on to become paragraphs, paragraphs run on to become chapters, and some characters' lines - most notably Galt's - run on to become full-blown speeches of fifty pages or more. If you've ever wondered how a writer could develop diarrhea of the pen and create a book four or five times longer than it needs to be, Atlas is a must-read. Any editor could have improved this book. We can almost hear Rand, fresh from her success with The Fountainhead, telling the publisher "you will print it exactly as is. Not one word changed, not one sentence deleted. Otherwise I will take it somewhere else." At 1,000-plus pages, Atlas is a monument to the writer's ego. And it reads it. There is no hint of Rand's humanity; she coldly kills off the bulk of the human race so that an ultra-talented, atheistic cabal can inherit the world. That one might not want to live in the resultant society of mass-murderers is never examined, because at the end of the book everyone is either capitalist or dead. I wonder how long it would be before the survivors started killing each other off as well - because hey, if I have what's yours as well as what's mine, that's twice as good. Without a system of ethics or morals to guide us, human society quickly degenerates to the tribal. Trust me, you don't want to go back to the jungle. Poor character development, strident tone, bad dialogue, wildly improbable plot, no examination of complex issues, no presentation of alternative or conflicting viewpoints, no sense of humanity, and an editor paid to vacation in Miami until after the book had come out. I give this book exactly one star.