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A plus. It doesn't get any better than this. In 100 pages, Dr. Gotthelf draws on everything known about Ayn Rand, from her novels, books, articles, journals, even spoken lectures and interviews, and gives the correct essentials. The emphasis is on her underlying philosophy, Objectivism, 'the philosophy for living on earth.' The politics of capitalism are only briefly sketched in. He clearly explains Ayn Rand's most complex innovation, her theory of concepts. Under ethics, he covers the 6 most important virtues. He opens and closes with Ayn Rand's benevolent universe premise and heroic view of mankind. He concludes with a passage from John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged.'Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride.... Fight with the radiant certainty and absolute of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.'

Excellent survey and summary. All the books in the Wadsworth Philosopher series are outstanding.

This book very skillfully summarizes one of the most thorough philosophies of all time in under a hundred pages. It's ample end notes provide numerous opportunites for those who wish to further investigate the issues raised. As Ayn Rand's name becomes more and more common, this will be a good place for people unfamiliar with her to find out who she was and what she stood for.

Millions of readers have recognized that Ayn Rand's novels present a revolutionary view of morality and politics. Sadly, however, very few of these readers--whether Rand's admirers or opponents--possess an adequate grasp of the foundations of her philosophic system. By focusing on her metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, "On Ayn Rand" presents a sympathetic, intellectually rigorous introduction to this philosophic system. A close reading (and re-reading) of Gotthelf's superb little volume would benefit greatly both beginning and advanced students of philosophy.
For beginning students, Gotthelf provides a number of unique values. First, his two chapters on Rand's life and intellectual development represent the only accurate intellectual biography in print, in part due to his unprecedented access to the Ayn Rand Archives. Second, Gotthelf introduces beginners to many technical issues in Rand's philosophy, and from these, he draws out the interesting, controversial implications, whether it be her avowed atheism, her uncompromising defense of reason, or her glowing appraisal of selfishness. Last, Gotthelf explicitly challenges Rand's views with relevant comparisons to historically important philosophers, including Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.
For advanced students of philosophy (including Rand's philosophy), there is too much of value to list here. Of particular note, though, Gotthelf analyzes aspects of Rand's theory of concepts that many students *think* they understand but seldom do, including the motivation *for* a theory of concepts, the how-done and how-to of concept-formation, and what "measurement-omission" really is. Further, Gotthelf's innovative formulations of familiar Objectivist concepts should defrost anyone's frozen abstractions. In just 100 pages, Gotthelf clears up many common misunderstandings of Rand's philosophy, including the ones that typically plague reviews of her books.
I can't recommend this pearl of a book highly enough.

It is no mean feat to compress the essential elements of Ayn Rand's system of thought into one hundred pages, but this professor Allan Gottelf of The College of New Jersey does extraordinarily well in his book On Ayn Rand. This work is part of a series of books from Wadsworth publishing, each of which is meant to encapsulate the thought of a seminal philosopher. It is promising to see a work on Rand's thought appear in a series of works containing the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Kant, and professor Gotthelf makes good on the judgment to place Rand alongside such thinkers in this short but rich work. Ayn Rand is without a doubt one of the most underrated and neglected thinkers and Gotthelf's book goes a long way toward redressing this grievance, letting readers know what is there in Rand's works to help set the stage for further discussion and for fruitful criticism, and doing so in an objective and scholarly manner.
Gotthelf's book opens with a fascinating account of Rand's life and intellectual development that helps to situate in the reader's mind the influences on and evolution of her thought. One of the things largely missing from the Randian literature is an analysis of the philosophers to whom Rand owes debts or borrows or modifies ideas (for instance, Rand claims that the only philosopher to whom she owes a debt is Aristotle, but she doesn't really go into this herself to any satisfactory length). While the work is a short exposition and not an exegesis of Rand's thought, it is threaded through with tantalizing acknowledgements of debts owed by Rand to other philosophers (mainly those owed to Aristotle). This is the sort of treatment that is needed to stimulate scholarly debate on Rand's ideas.
Most of Gotthelf's book covers Rand's metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, the areas that Rand judged to be the fundamental areas of philosophy and from which the other branches of philosophy are derived. Gotthelf's coverage of these areas, especially of her metaphysics and theory of concept formation, is exemplary and evidences a deep understanding of Rand's ideas. Given the constraints under which professor Gotthelf was working (a one-hundred page limit) it reflects sound judgment that he chose to concentrate on the areas that Rand judged to be fundamental and cover these areas well (relative to the book's size constraints). But her political theory is such an important and radical aspect of her thought (about as much could be said of her aesthetics) that it seems cheating to end the work with just a couple of pages on it. One gets a sense of the axiomatic structure of her thought from the book and can hypothesize how she arrives at the positions that she takes in the other branches of philosophy (politics, aesthetics), but Gotthelf doesn't show how she arrives at them (although he sketches out how she does) and it couldn't be obvious to one not acquainted with her thought how she arrives at them and how successful her defense of these positions is.
On Ayn Rand is a must read for any student of Rand's thought and for anyone interested in studying philosophy. The other books in this Wadsworth philosophers series would be fortunate to do as well as this one.