Explains Everything Of Today

Amazing collection of her best work, read in a manner that ensured comprehension. I found myself nodding over and over as her predictions of outcome were manifested in today's news. Please give this book to your children. If I'd had it at 15 years of age my life would have been so much easier. The narrator was perfect. If you have struggled to understand Rand in written form, these Audible offerings will be your remedy as they were mine.

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Where has this been all my life?

This woman was really sharp. I had never heard of Leonard Peikoff before so I was pleasantly impressed. While it's a lot to digest, it is prescient. (I will review it again as needed & envision a paper copy w/ tabs and marks in my library)
Funny, I had just finished the Communist Manifesto (again 😣). I struggled with Marx when I was young so went back into it and realized now in my 50s that it really was just a bunch of gobbledygook. My goodnes.

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Important, true, and enjoyable

These essays are excellent and interesting. This should be listened to by anyone interested in learning and ideas.

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Smart, insightful —with 1 very perplexing chapter


This was an enjoyable and insight-laden compilation, and I found the essays by Rand and Peikoff with respect to concepts and concept formation particularly orienting and relevant today; I also benefited from the many evaluations and narrations of the concrete consequences of such abstractions in day-to-day affairs and institutions.


Yet most striking to me was the penultimate chapter, chapter 31, ‘Libertarianism, the Perversion of Liberty”, by Peter Schwartz. Schwartz brings up the interesting and true point that we can only be good or evil if we can choose, and that morality, therefore, depends on freedom.



From this observation that liberty, irrespective of any subsequent good or evil, is required for good, Schwartz —and here he did not make sense to me— vituperatively lambasts —in my estimation, misrepresents and libels— libertarianism as adhering to a ‘litany of irrationalities’, ’rejecting all values’ as ‘logically leading to nihilism’. He writes that ‘nothing matters to libertarians, not even the value of life itself… they [libertarians] want to be free to act without purpose reason, to achieve nothing in particular’, seeking ‘freedom from the demands of existence’. ‘Libertarians reject anything that tells them that there is something that they should not do, that there is something that will not yield to their emotions -that there is something; reality itself is the limitation they ultimately resent, it is from the universe as such that libertarians wish to be liberated.’

Schwartz then warns libertarians and people who might know a libertarian that many Nazi’s and Stalinist Marxists were —just as libertarians are today— blind to the essential nature of their own philosophies, and informs the reader that ‘libertarianism is incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism, incompatible with morality, incompatible with reason, and incompatible with the requirements of human life’. 




This book was a great read for people interested in the fundamental ideas that Rand promoted, and for those interested in freedom and morality generally. Chapter 31, however, was either sorrily out of place in this book, or a crucially important chapter whose point I failed to comprehend. I’ll read it again in a few months, and in the interim will read other defenses and elaborations on this pretty inflammatory chapter —perhaps I’ll come to see that Schwartz, in what seemed initially like rambling nonsense and misconstrued ideas, made a very useful critical point. ...The judge and jury will reconvene on this in future.

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perfect to finish her legacy

great articles and letters to complete any collection of ayn rnads work. two thumbs up

Inspirational

Loved to hear words of reality, thanks you. The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t meet Ayn Rand :(

Many good essays

If you are familiar with objectivist literature, there is some repetition here, but many new things as well, and most of it is really good. Very good material for a person who would like to have happiness on earth.

If you are new to Ayn Rand, this will give you some insight in some of her perspectives.

Almost a masterpiece.

Was good till the end when Miss Rand contradicted herself, Liberty, and attacked Murray Rothbard.