Ayn Rand

This book is a really good, short read for anyone who has either read any of Ayn Rand's books or has just heard about her and wants to know more. These days, most people under 30 years of age have probably heard very brief references to her on episodes of The Simpsons or South Park, unless they read the Wall Street Journal. I first heard about Ayn Rand from a 1999 article in the WSJ about a hedge fund operator who had set up shop in the Carribean and made everyone who worked for him read Atlas Shrugged. This hedge fund manager had gotten into trouble with the law in regards to his brothers's death (if memory serves) which is why the story was in the WSJ to begin with. After that I tried reading Atlas Shrugged and it took me 3 separate tries because its such a long and engrossing book. Reading it and then realizing that Rand wrote it only a few years after really learning English made me really admire how hard she worked to make it in the United States and also to learn, and be truly fluent, in English. As I read the Baker Biography, I also realized that many other people throughout the years must have used her as a sort of idol of ideas. But as I read further, I realized that she was a bit of a hypocrite and seemed to live some of the very things that she fought against. For instance, she felt that no one should live for anyone else and that no one should want anyone else living for them--individualism!!!! But she also brow-beat members of her inner circle who refused to take up smoking cigarettes. I just found that to be mutually exclusive to the things that she taught. Also it seemed like she admired powerful men in her novels: John Galt, Hank Reardon, Francisco D'Aconia and others; but she married a man who almost seemed to live off her income and do very little on his own except raise birds. The Baker book made no bones that it was unbiased either way about Ayn Rand and her ideas and just set out to express both sides of her life and also the people who worshipped or hated her--sometimes that person was one and the same.