Ayn Rand, author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," discovered more important philosophic truths than any other thinker of the 20th century. She held that morality is derived from the facts of reality. "Good" doesn't mean following the orders of an incomprehensible God or the whims of society. "Good" means "good for life." And since men can only survive by thinking and discovering what is needed for survival, she named rationality as the primary virtue. Recognizing that you can only prosper by thinking for yourself, constitutes the virtue of independence. Recognizing that you have to work for a living constitutes the virtue of productiveness. Being true to facts as a matter of principle, is the virtue of honesty. Being true to yourself is the virtue of integrity. Being rational in judging other men is the virtue of justice. And recognizing that you're able to live as a rational being and worthy to live, constitutes the virtue of pride.

During the 1960s Nathaniel Branden, who at that time was a brilliant thinker, formed a lecture organization to help spread Ayn Rand's ideas. I was one of the students who attended his courses on philosophy and psychology. No one suspected it at the time, and there was no independent confirmation of it until years after Miss Rand's death in 1982, but she and Nathaniel Branden had an affair. All relationship between them came to an end in 1968, when Miss Rand discovered that Branden was not practicing what he preached.

This is Nathaniel Branden's version of their relationship-or rather, one of his versions, for he's changed his story several times. Branden has never heard the adage "a gentleman never tells." Or perhaps he doesn't mind not being considered a gentleman.

This is a long book; but the reader should not lose sight of an essential fact. Branden confesses, on page after page, that he lied to Miss Rand and to others-not once, but repeatedly, for a number of years. His excuse-"she made me do it"-rings hollow, coming from a man who lectured on the virtues of honesty, integrity, and independence.

After confessing his prevarications and being so "candid," Branden expects us to believe what he's saying now. Instead, I suggest we ask the question: "How do we know you aren't still lying, given that you've had so much practice?"

The charming Dr. Branden explains in this sympathetic and heart-wrenching memoir how he was going to bed with three fantastic women simultaneously--his teacher, his wife, and his girlfriend--and, despite the complaisance of the husband of the teacher, and his own wife, and making an exciting living for everyone, and his own notable psychological acumen, simply blew it, and but good.Anyone who wishes to make like the Latin Lover should read this instruction manual of taking a simple matter to FUBAR--and beyond--with care.

Still, would those who laugh at Branden and Rand's romantic difficulties been cheered if it had all worked out? No, they would have been denouncing Rand and her menage a cinq as a threat to dull marriages everywhere, that's for sure.

What went wrong? I am reminded of the Spanish saying--repeated in the Dorsai series--that who annoys a philosopher annoys the lion in the den. The lioness got annoyed, particularly given her regimen of medicine that made her quite irritable.

Branden tells the tale better than expected of people who handled living a fantasy or perhaps a dream better than most. And anyone who has been torn by divided loves, and yet tried to make things work, will be with him. The rest was rotten luck and tuesday night quarterbacking.

The source and title of this book belie too much, unfortunately. These comments are strictly a marginal reflection of Ayn Rand as philosopher and social commentator. The point seems to have been to demonstrate how cogently Rand could describe -- with an uninhibited pencil in hand under her reading lamp -- the unadmitted philosophic essentials of many other writers' works.

Where this falls short, and it should be obvious, is in these being her marginalia. This isn't sustained critical comment that comes to its own point of view. And as the editor admits, the preponderance of negative comments is to be expected, for why would anyone bother to constantly show agreement? Especially when such marginal notes were never intended for others' eyes?

Beyond this lack of critical distance is the frequent lack of even any attempt at a connected argument on her part. The major exceptions to this are found with Ludwig von Mises' influential economic treatise, "Human Action," and a philosophic textbook by her one-time friend and longtime libertarian activist John Hospers.

Although Rand's lengthy comments are often pithy and penetrating, her depth of analysis depends too often upon the quality of her literary targets. To tear apart the campaign writing of Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative" is almost laughably easy, and Rand has a free and spirited (though not at all denigrating) time with doing so. The analysis of Mises, by contrast, shows up her particular distinctions far more clearly, though it isn't her doing. It's due more to Mises making an intricate economic argument, rather than his engaging in propagandistic persuasion.

This last example, sadly, shows how one of Rand's own foibles tripped her up, for she becomes fixated on how Mises uses the concept of "subjective." His usage is closer to that of "personal judgment," apart from -- though not opposed to -- objective analysis or comparison to external fact. Rand persists, as she did elsewhere, ! in assuming that it is used as a synonym for "the arbitrary."

Such a shortcoming as a commentator is far less pronounced in Rand's own essays and polemics -- and *these* are cogent and often brilliant, in her collections of essays with titles ranging from "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" to "Philosophy: Who Needs It."

Where Rand is shown to fall short -- in an arena that she thought would remain private -- is in circling back on the errors of others who could not keep their own points as clear as she kept her own. She is putting her analytical stamp on the creations of others, here, but is following *their* leads as to what is important and what is not.

It'd be better by far to have had her concise eye placed upon others' writings, or on news events, with more sustained philosophic attention. Aside from her collected magazine/newsletter essays, in "The Ayn Rand Letter" and "The Ayn Rand Column," she created very little of such work. She did even less work comparing her own extensive philosophic integrations with those of others -- except, briefly, Immanuel Kant.

By dredging up these "Marginalia," one evident motive is to fill this gap and to promote Rand as more of a commentator than she was, and with more of a grasp of the culture around her than she possessed. It's an admirable attempt. But it fails to keep one's attention for the same reason that Peter Keating's architectural mishmashes failed to work in her novel "The Fountainhead": the reactive effort is against and bound up with others' work, not against the objective challenges of life.

Newcomers to Rand are advised to begin, after trying her masterful and provocative fiction, with any of the essay collections she created between 1964 and 1982.

This collection of marginal notes is only for those who have been thoroughly exposed to her viewpoint and choose to focus on her persona and strength of mind. It shows many sparks of both these parts of her life, but only by thei! r being chipped off of authors that rarely rise to her own level of luminous wordcraft.

I had read a number of the books before I read Miss Rand's comments on them. What struck me most was how dead on she was. I remember recoiling in horror at the same places in Hayek's _Road to Serfdom_ that Rand did. Ayn Rand's Marginalia is an excellent book. It brilliantly shows her mind at work as a _reader_. It serves as an wonderful companion to both her Journals and Letters books.

It is almost as if you are sitting right next to Ayn Rand as she critically read and evaluated. You can watch her home in on the essentials -- and often the essential nonsense -- in some important and influential books. The best part is that you can have this intimate, private view of such a great mind for the small price of this book.

Although Erickson makes some good points along the way, the book on the whole is a disappointment. Erickson committed three cardinal mistakes in writing it. To begin with, he unwisely adopts a dialogue form of presentation. The trouble with this is that philosophical dialogues constitute the most difficult form of philosophical writing. In order to for a dialogue to be effective, the characters participating in it must be presented as real human beings, not just cardboard puppets ventriloquistically manipulated by the author. Erickson is clearly out of his depth in the whole business. His characters have no personality at all. They do not fight for their ideas, like real human beings would, but calmly accept all the arguments presented by the character Philosophus, who represents Erickson himself. Erickson would have been better off writing the work in the traditional style of the essay. Philosophical dialogues should only be written by those equipped with the necessary literary and dramatic genius to bring them off. A second mistake involves Erickson's decision to focus primarily on abstruse technical questions. Too much of his book is preoccupied with an analysis of vague philosophical terms. Terms like absolute, apprehension, contextual, free will, identity, necessity, reason, unit, and value are tossed around as if they meant something definite. Most of Erickson's critique reduces itself merely to a purely verbal analysis of the meanings of these vague terms, out of which obscure technical problems are deduced and endlessly quibbled over. Erickson would have been better off focusing the lion's share of his attention on the factual shortcomings of some of Rand's more controversial philosophical contentions. It is on the empirical side that Objectivism is most vulnerable.Toward the end of the book, we find one of Erickson's puppet-characters declaring: "I think we now have a sufficient understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of ObjectivismŠ" This implies that Erickson believes his discussion of Rand's philosophy is comprehensive. Here he commits his third mistake: for his book is not comprehensive. It ommits a discussion of two of Rand's most important and characteristic doctrines: her theory of human nature and her theory of history. You would think a doctrine as critical to the Objectivist ideology as this one would warrent a word or two from Erickson's cast of puppets, but they are strangely silent on the whole issue. What could possibly be the reason for this? I suspect the major reason is that Erickson more or less sympathizes with Rand's view of history and thus sees no reason to animadvert against it. He prefers to quibble over such inconsequential issues as time and space and the problems raised by discussing perception in terms of vague philosophical concepts. It is primarily for the above stated reasons that I cannot give Erickson's book a rating higher than two stars. While he does, as I stated above, make a few good points along the way, the book on the whole is overly-technical, prolix, destitute of empirical rigor and, worst of all, dull.

Erickson's critique of Objectivism is highly defective. While he brings a sincerity to his discussion which other of Rand's commentators have not possessed, his arguments are generally poor and his reports of Rand's claims confused. The book is also badly planned and edited and suffers grievously under the dead weight of its dialogue form. Erickson's misapprehensions reach their deepest when he discusses technical issues in the Objectivist epistemology. Rand and her followers introduce the notion 'perceptual form' to indicate the *means* by which something is *directly* observed by a knowing subject. Erickson fails to grasp the difference between Objectivism's unique variant of direct realism and the flawed but popular theory of perception wherein the knowing subject apprehends, not something external to herself, but internal *representations* of the external. Because of this confusion, Erickson treats Objectivism as reifying form into the object of perception itself, and in attacking this idea argues against a theory which Objectivism opposes. His error is based on a misunderstanding of what it is to perceive something in-a-form. He believes that Rand wishes to argue that we perceive things in a *different* form; different, presumably, from the one which they possess on their own. But since form is the means by which we perceive a thing, there is no form which a thing is in other than the one in which it is perceived. Erickson performs a similar reification of the notion 'unit', which is again simply the external object of awareness under a certain perspective. After about the middle of the book, Erickson's prose becomes very garbled and the quality of argument - already dubious - suffers. He moves into various technical issues in the sciences and economics which are inappropriate to a book on philosophy. He argues against the Einsteinian view of the relativistic nature of space and time on purely *a priori* grounds, hardly the way to approach empirical questions. Even so, his arguments are not successful. The book's cover advertises a solution to the problem of universals, but I must confess I could not find it. He introduces God into his speculations with no more attempt at proof than the claim that "Atheism is getting to be out-of-date" (p. 219) The philosophy which he attempts to present under the name "Factivity" lacks an analysis of, among other things, facts. The book has two virtues. The first is its general fair-mindedness. Erickson is willing to adopt ideas from Rand and seems to have no psychological axe to grind; he even intervenes on her behalf early in the book, making decent arguments for her position which she never herself made. The second is his comparison between Rand and the Marxist tradition, especially Lenin. While Erickson is not the first to make this comparison, he provides new and intriguing references and points of similarity.

This book is excellent for readers who agreed with many of Rand's views but were upset by her atheism. It removes a basic contradiction: If belief in God causes the "evil" in Atlas shrugged, why does the Catholic faith argue against the same evil. Simple, Rand was wrong.

The book attacks Objectivism, but does not argue against Rand's true genius -- her ability to get inside the head of New Age man and describe and explain this evil being.

The book does answer the question on universals. The observations on memory are brilliant.

Examples of the new philosophy of Factivism include: "Name a nonexistant fact" answer the Past.

The only reason for the four stars is that the book is hard to read. I have read it four times and have mastered only about 50%. Definitely geared to philosophy buffs. Another similar book is "Raselas" (spelling)

The book description Amazon provides is accurate. Do not expect much philosophy, controversy, or excitement from this book. It contains two papers written by Miss Rand before she left Russia, most likely for school assignments. It will probably only be of interest to hard-core Rand fanatics such as myself. Buy it if you are a collector of Ayn Rand memorabilia, or want to support the Ayn Rand Institute.

You are probably reading this to get some information on the content of this book. The gem of the book is Ayn Rand's essay, Hollywood: American City of Movies. This is a tribute to a city built on the art form of movies. Most of the actors she pays tribute to are from the silent movie era, like Charlie Chaplin. This essay is excellent. A section of the book is entitled Ayn Rand's Movie Diary. Ayn Rand's movie reviews are all from the 1920's and consist of giving only a 1-5 point rating with no analysis. A very limited amount of movies looked at. Some of the pages are taken up by the Russian translation of Ayn Rands writing. This book should not be your first, or even your second, Ayn Rand book.

There have been many attacks on Rand and her philosophy, some more coherent than others. The author is almost a caricature of a Rand hater. His Randists insist that someone must wear the dollar sign on his person before going to a meeting; the heroing wants to be raped. He completely misses all of Rand's points; this book is totally ridiculous. And the author's understanding of Rand's philosophy is better than his writing skills!!

This book is a collection of short stories. It takes a certain type of wit to appreciate it. It would appeal to a very limited minority of thinkers, namely of the abstract, academic type.

Each story seems to have this ever-present nerdy college guy theme to it. Between you and me dear reader, I haven't had much thought about my GPA or major or any other sort of thing a college student thinks about in nearly two decades, so I found the book to be a bit juvenile.

The author's highlighted short story, 'The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand' is reasonably entertaining. The character compares the novelist's writings in the story, 'The Fountainhead' to his dealings with the complex emotional need of the typical collegiate female. The main character takes lessons in manhood from reading Rand's interpretation of what the ideal man should be like.

In addition to this somewhat satirical look at young relationships, the author has a couple of vaguely entertaining essays included in the overall book. Of honorable mention was one that discussed the consequences of one man sporting a new mustache.

Unfortunately, the better stories are overshadowed by the inclusion of some tasteless or absurd creations. But again, it takes a certain type of wit to appreciate this type of writing and mine isn't one of them.

Like Thomas Mann, the author's protagonists are often passionate about classical music. However, the "tone" of these stories are overall light and humorous: a difference between Latino and German styles perhaps. Nonetheless, the "review" of the San Juan piano recital and murder, one of my favorites, reminded me slightly of Mann's "Mario and the Magician". Unfortunately, the events of this particular story evolve in the 3rd person, leaving me with many unanswered questions of character and plot motivation.

Although the book comes across as a fairly loose collection of unrelated stories and satirical essays, a unifying theme becomes clear as one reaches the last page. The common impulse towards the careless, oftentimes hapless, adoption of the seemingly new or sophisticated, and the resulting descent from what was initially mere self-delusion towards self-made hells is my view of the author's dark vision. It's a journey from a young boy's energetic innocence in the Dickey stories, of the first half of the book, towards the final description of an island society that has become too sophisticated to have any use whatsoever for human speech.

I feel grateful to the author for, what is for me, an auspicious introduction to Latino literature. Now I feel inspired to give Marquez a whirl.

As an ex-Objectivist and Rand sympathizer, I was hoping that this book would turn out to be a helpful addition to the Objectivist library. However, while disagreeing with some of the negative remarks about Rand herself, I am forced to agree with the other reviewers that Porter has contributed nothing of substance to the Objectivist oeuvre. This book will only provide fodder for the enemies of Rand and her philosophy. Definitely NOT recommended, to Objectivists or anyone else.

The other reviewers are right - this dog of a book should never have been published. In fact it seems to have been published by the author himself by way of a vanity press. Well, he shouldn't have wasted his time or his money, and I shouldn't have wasted mine. This author knows NOTHING about philosophy, but that doesn't stop him from complaining REPEATEDLY that philosophers are a bunch of idiots. If possible, he's even more ignorant (and prouder of it) than Rand herself.

I suppose it is enivitable that Porter would get bad reviews: He is often critical of Rand which will alienate the randroids. He is always critical of contemporary philosophy, which will alienate most people who have wasted their time pursuing the subject academically.(i.e. anyone who has studied in a western university).He shows how Rand successfully undercuts the modern Left at the deepest metaphysical and epistemological levels. Thats probably a substantial proportion of readers of any philosophical book.

In this book Porter demonstrates that Rand has developed a theory of concepts which is extremely powerful and which resolves both a multitude of philosophical mistakes and philosophical problems. Careful reading of this book gives you a superb grip on her theory, but it is hard, detailed work. This work is well worth doing as it will give you deeper insight into philosophy in general and concepts and conceptual thought in particular.

I wonder if any of the reviewers above who gave it one star could substantiate their judgement in detail. It appears to be the usual sneering, devoid of reflection.