{"id":35935,"date":"2026-11-13T13:17:01","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T19:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35935"},"modified":"2026-11-12T03:19:13","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T09:19:13","slug":"book-report-the-ayn-rand-companion-by-mimi-reisel-gladstein-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/13\/book-report-the-ayn-rand-companion-by-mimi-reisel-gladstein-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <em>The Ayn Rand Companion<\/em> by Mimi Reisel Gladstein (1984)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/theaynrandcompanion.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Well, of all the books I bought <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/08\/good-book-hunting-friday-november-6-2026-and-saturday-november-7-2026\/\" target=\"_new\">last weekend<\/a> (all being five I bought in two trips to ABC Books, so its not like an <em>all<\/em> at dollar day at a book sale), I jumped into this relatively short treatment of Ayn Rand&#8217;s works written\/finished not long after her death&#8211;well, two years, I guess, but, boy howdy, she (Rand) was quite the thing for a while.  You don&#8217;t see her mentioned much on Substacks these days, so she has fallen out of favor with the young crowd, and apparently I have been remiss in reading her&#8211;in all the years of this blog&#8217;s book reports, I&#8217;ve only re-read <em>The Fountainhead<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/05\/11\/book-review-the-fountainhead-by-ayn-rand-1943\/\" target=\"_new\">in 2005<\/a> and listened to the address &#8220;Philosophy: Who Needs It?&#8221; (not even re-reading the book) <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/26\/on-philosophy-who-needs-it-by-ayn-rand-1974\/\" target=\"_new\">in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This book is designed to be an introduction to the academic study of Rand and her works.  It has five chapters:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Biographical Data, a rough sketch of her life.<\/li>\n<li>The Fiction, an overview of her four novels, one short story, and one play.<\/li>\n<li>A Compendium of Characters, an encyclopedia of her characters broken down on whether they&#8217;re heroes, villains, respectable characters, or morally neutral characters (the last category being the smallest given how Rand portrayed characters as very black or white).<\/li>\n<li>The Nonfiction, which discusses her later books and articles for the various official Objectivist organs.<\/li>\n<li>Criticism of Rand&#8217;s Works, a survey of some of the contemporary reactions to her work and reviews of her publications.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At 130 pages (including introduction and index), it was a three-night read amongst other grazing.  It didn&#8217;t present a lot of new material, and its biography comes mostly from news accounts and <em>Who Is Ayn Rand?<\/em>, but it&#8217;s not quite a homer take, acknowledging that she had a penchant for excommunicating members of her circle and being vituperative and, well, petty at times.  I guess Nathaniel Branden aired his dirty laundry later.<\/p>\n<p>But, still, it makes me want to re-read <em>The Fountainhead<\/em> and maybe get copies for my boys as they&#8217;re in the age range where it can inspire (and\/or damage).  No worse than what they get on the Internet anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, of all the books I bought last weekend (all being five I bought in two trips to ABC Books, so its not like an all at dollar day at a book sale), I jumped into this relatively short treatment of Ayn Rand&#8217;s works written\/finished not long after her death&#8211;well, two years, I guess, but, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35935"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35937,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35935\/revisions\/35937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}