Two new books on Ayn Rand are out, one that we’ve been promoting, which focuses on the life of Rand’s ideas and their evolution. It also includes new details about her personal life and her work associations and how they affected the growth of the movement that adopted her ideas.
This is appropriate given how central ideas were in Rand’s life. Whatever your opinion of her work, it is a great thing to encounter a figure who believed very seriously in the notion that what you believe about the world really matters. In fact, she arguably took this notion too far, believing that ideas are the foundational source of all ownership – even to the point of owning the ideas themselves. The book that draws attention to this is Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns. This book caused my own admiration of what she accomplished to go way up. To me, this book is a model of what a serious biography of a serious person should be like.
In contrast, there is Any Rand and the World She Made, by Anne Heller of Esquire and Redbook, a book that focuses on Rand’s sex life and loves and any other prurient details she can dig up at the expense of the ideological core of Rand and her life. The author apparently can’t conceive of the possibility that Rand’s life was really all about ideology and ideas and why they matter. So guess which book gets the headlines in the New York Times while Burns’s serious work is relegated to a parenthetical statement? To ask the question is to answer it.
