I have finished reading Atlas shrugged by Any Rand. The author talks about strong people, fighting and winning. The book is long and I had a feeling that the book consists of three more on less independent books. But towards the final pages I felt that I do not want the book to end.
I read “Atlas shrugged”, because I liked “The Fountainhead” by Rand (my wife suggested both books to me). “The Fountainhead” talks about struggle of individual men to remain true to their values. “Atlas shrugged” takes this struggle to a national level. Now the fight is between groups of people. One group is represented by men of mind aka industrialists, and the other group is men of no-mind aka politicians. The book outlines what methods are used by both groups and why they use them. The main point of the book is that a person must use mind to live and happiness is the ultimate goal. The author provides very logical explanation of why this statement must be true. Of course, the statement comes with a premise that one can not obtain happiness by the price of someone else happiness. I did not remember that it was explained why this premise is logical. In either way, my major concern with the book is that it creates a vision that people achieve by the means of logical reasoning alone. Rearden (one of the books main characters) spent 10 years in the lab to create his metal. The picture that books draw is that logic was the tool for discovering the metal. As a scientist myself, I know that it is very unlikely scenario. “Intuition” by Osho has a very good explanation of the sources for our achievements.
Overall, “Atlas shrugged” is a great book. It is very well written and the subject of the book is worthy of writing a book about.