Michael Mullins

Rand succeeds despite shitty politics and a sophomoric world-view. The more I explore literature, the more I realize just how flawed a novel can be and still hold up. With Rand there are two types of characters and that's all you get: White Hats and Blacks Hats. The White Hats are the heroes, standing alone against an inferior sea of snivelling underlings, incapable of seeing just how magnificent the White Hats actually are. The Black Hats are any of the aforementioned underlings unfortunate enough to show up in the foreground sufficiently for Rand to take notice. Their job it to try to thwart the noble (and capitalistic) ambitions of the White Hats.

On one level this is so much roman à clé, used to support Rand's philosophic darling, Objectivism. And in her mind, I have no doubt, the staring role of Chief White Hat belonged to Rand herself. The problem with literature as rhetoric is that humanity is invariably more complex and flawed than any such Black and White thinking can represent. In the real world, every White Hat riding in on White Horse probably has a whore tied up in the closet, just waiting for him (or her) to stop saving the world long enough to return and do whatever depravity White Hats do when no one is looking. Without nuance, character remains caricature.

And yet the novel works. There are two overarching skills that come into play for novelists. Writing and storytelling. And while Rand is a bad writer she is a very good, if not great, storyteller. (This same argument could be made about J.K. Rowling, save that she doesn't have a political ax to grind - unless you include muggle discrimination in and amongst the wizard world. Also, literary theory doesn't always carry over well between mainstream/literary books and genre writing.) So while Rand's prose suffers from simplistic characterizations and a mind stuck somewhere in deep adolescence, the book itself is underpinned by an engaging story, a phenomenal sense of world and place, and a real talent for plotting that would be equally at home in, say, a book by Rushdie or Pynchon as one by Stephen King or Dan Brown.

By all means, give it a try. Even with its deep flaws I gave it four stars. And I stand by that. Despite her considerable efforts to ruin it this novel has good bones. The only caveat would be for a young person approaching the book for the first time. Please understand that the politics presented here - those explicit and those implied - are untenable when held against the light. Neoconservatism (also confusedly referred to as Neoliberalism) is ultimately an attempt to justify our baser instincts as not merely acceptable and unavoidable, but noble. (For a more adult perspective, check out Ken Wilber, though his novel Boomeritis is lacking in all the places Rand excels. In short, he's not much in the novel-writing department. Luckily he writes mostly non-fiction. Start there.)

If you can see past the sophism, you might just enjoy Atlas Shrugged. You'll also come to understand why Randall Jarrell referred to a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.”

Another supposed health book which is really just a front for advertising specific products and services. You can't recommend things to buy in your book and still retain your integrity.

Sprinkled throughout the book were listed recommended brands, by name, and links to those products. That means that this is no longer a health book but sponsored content, and thus completely and immediately discredited. Who is to say whether claims made in the book were made because the science backs them up or because the claims would lead unsuspecting readers to buy the products listed.

If the authors are going to write a book intended to help people, then they must in future avoid any whiff of partiality when it comes to specific products. Even this doesn't ensure the purity of the information provided. An author who owns a food company or has a stake in such a company, for instance, is pretty much disqualified from writing such a book and having it taken seriously.

People are tired of their health being sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.

This is less the Marie Antoinette diet and more the Karen Wheeler diet. Wheeler starts with a valid premise: the French are slim and relatively healthy (certainly compared to Americans), so we should do what they do, but then she starts ‘improving' things.One of the original books advocating French eating (or at least one of the first I encountered) is [b:The Fat Fallacy : Applying the French Diet to the American Lifestyle 3318694 The Fat Fallacy Applying the French Diet to the American Lifestyle William Clower https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267932149l/3318694.SX50.jpg 3356447]. Start there if you like. There are dozens of other books along more or less the same line. Where these books say, this is what the French do, do it the same way, then follow those books. Where these books say, yes, but we know better, so instead do this — ignore that advice. All of these books have value, but you have to separate out the increasingly ancient wisdom of how the French eat to how a particular author believes they can improve on this ancient wisdom.All of this is not to say that the French way of eating is the healthiest, but you will lose weight, especially if you can get behind four principles of French eating:1. Eat only the highest quality, most natural ingredients.2. Proper portion sizes are much smaller than you think. Check out what a typical portion size would have been in the 1950s — this is a good guide.3. Eat mindfully, slowly, and without distraction.4. Don't snack. A meal begins. It ends. You're done. We're not cows and we do not need to graze. (Do you really want the bulbous cow to be your model?)There is more to it, fine detail and subtleties, but these four get you to 80%.There's no clear way to rate this book. It's a mixed bag. Further complicating things is the fact that although Marie Antoinette was French, to be sure, she did live in the 18th century. Evolution in the French diet has naturally occurred. To add potential injury to insult, understand that although a person eating a typical American diet will almost certainly improve their health and reduce their size by mimicking the French way of eating, there are healthier ways of eating. Myself, I cycle through a number of paradigms, depending on intuition and current need. If you want to be slimmer, the French have your pass at the ready, but if you want to be healthier you're going to need to maybe start here and then invest in a much more nuanced nutritional education.

Fact #1: As a rule, I refuse to DNF books. I would estimate that the ratio of books which I put down and say, “Nope, I'm done.” is about 1:150. I put books down all the time, but that's because I read like an ADHD howler monkey on cocaine, surrounded by the many shiny objects which comprise our ever-increasing shared literary heritage. My intent is always to pick them back up at a later date.

Fact #2: As a rule, I do not write reviews of books which I have not read front to back.

Fact #3: I have no problem viewing women as equals, and in the case of individual skills, betters. I've never understood the need to denigrate women. Accuse me of misogyny if you want — and some will want to by the end of this review — but I have no problem with the ongoing sexual revolution.

Fact #4: I was very much in the mood for an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #5: This book — or what I read of it — seems to be (wait for it...) an intellectually stimulating book on programming, a perhaps philosophical smorgasbord of interesting and at times fascinating essays and stories about the history of computers and that surprisingly engaging pastime some of us engage in known as programming.

Fact #6: But the women (and perhaps some men) involved in the production of this book ruined it. Instead what we have is actually a smokescreen. The authors and most certainly the editors of the book wanted you to think this was a book about programming but actually this was a book about the contributions of women to programming, and any actual entertainment value derived from the book about the fascinating subject of programming was purely accidental. They had an ax to grind and they ground it at every available opportunity.

Fact #7: If they had written a book about the contributions of women to the discipline of programming and billed it as such, I might have read it, finished it, and then praised it. Assuming of course it was well-written. But instead they tried to backdoor an agenda in there, reminding the reader continuously of the unfairness of being a women.

For anyone interested, I put do the book down at this paragraph:

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During the first half of 1964, two college-age White men, John McGeachie and Michael Busch, devoted hours to computer programming. So much time, in fact, that McGeachie was known as 225, short for the GE-225 mainframe computer for which he was responsible, and Busch was known as 30, short for the GE Datanet-30 computer that he programmed. They were students at Dartmouth, an elite, overwhelmingly White, Ivy League college that admitted only men as undergraduates, and they were coding a new computing network. In the early 1960s, McGeachie's and Busch's access to technology was extraordinary.
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