This was my first introduction to Ayn Rand's actual writing--although not to the controversy surrounding her literary legacy and philosophical postulations. 
 I'll be up front in saying I don't personally subscribe to the "Objectivism" perspective she's said to have founded. I see it as cynical and isolationist, presenting both pragmatic pros and callous cons, but ultimately proving incompatible with the basic tenants of Christianity. None the less, I don't see my disagreements with Ms. Rand as reason to utterly disregard her writing out of hand. For this reviewer, it wasn't too difficult to be subjective in considering this relatively short piece of work. 
 Anthem takes place in a futuristic dystopia in which technology has been repressed and individuality stripped away in the name of the greater good. The story is told entirely from the perspective of Equality 7-2521, a young street sweeper with an overactive mind and an inexplicable drive to resist the menial purpose his collective society has assigned him. When he stumbles upon some of the ruins from the previous (and far more advanced) civilization, he's compelled to explore his forbidden findings in secret. As his sense of self grows and his questions mount, Equality must eventually choose whether to embrace reality as he's previously known it or risk everything in a search for himself. 
 "There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak." 
 When I started this book, I for some reason assumed this was a bit of Orwellian-inspired fiction--minus the high-tech government surveillance and with the interesting addition of an anti-eugenics component. A quarter of the way through I looked it up and realized that the book actually came out a full decade before 1984 and seven years before Animal Farm... so I can't call it Orwellian so much as a predecessor dystopian concept. (Much like Orwell, Rand's worldview and concerns for the future had been heavily influenced by their experiences with the Russian Revolution of 1917.) 
 While I found Orwell's prose dry and his characters unsympathetic, Rand presented a smoother more lyrical read fit with a main character I actually began to care for. Readers essentially follow the main character's introspective transition from a do-as-you're-told drone to mental and, in some sense, spiritual independence. He shifts from the ingrained identification of "we" to the recognition of "I." And in doing so, closes out the story with a degree of hopefulness and determination I hadn't expected out of a piece of original dystopian literature. Where Orwell leaves the depressing sense that the world he describes isn't savable or worth saving, Rand offers something that borders on grandiose anticipation. 
 The author's personal philosophy does come through heavy-handed toward the very end. In escaping his initial programming the main character's perspective performs a manic swing, lurching from the extreme of collectivism to near complete self-centeredness--from "there is no god" to "I am my own god." While misguidedly imbalanced, it rang true of human nature and wounded tendencies I've seen displayed time and again. When we rebel passionately against something we tend to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," as it were--at least initially. 
 Perhaps it's true that Rand spent a great deal of her literary time overcompensating for experiences and beliefs she'd rejected. But at the same time, this reader has to wonder if those who discard her works entirely aren't guilty of the same thing--simply on the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. 
 Just a thought. 
 "The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom." 
 -- Ayn Rand