AYN RAND: A Sense of Life

Rand's life unfolds in images, dialogue, and music in this "loving--but not fawning--documentary look at this fascinating figure of the 20th-century intellectual life" ("The Washington Post"). 32 color photos. 125 halftones.

Basically, this is a souvenir booklet for the Academy Award^-nominated documentary film with the same title. Some souvenir booklet, though. The text is the film's verbal continuity, and the illustrations, which occupy much more page-space than the words, are still photographs and a few drawings from animation sequences in the film. The subject is the procapitalist novelist-philosopher whose mammoth romances The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged still, the script avers, sell tens of thousands of copies yearly. (Another astonishing claim here is that of a poll that found Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book in America.) The script, which transcribes much ungrammatical spontaneous speech whose meanings are clarified in the film by vocal tone and facial expression, is often vague. Visually, however, the book is most impressive. Randians worth their salt should swoon over this wonderful supplement to Barbara Branden's Passion of Ayn Rand (1987) and Chris Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). Ray Olson