Ready for her close-up.

• Author: Machan, Tibor R.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

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Nick Gillespie's review of two recent Ayn Rand biographies ("Ready for Her Close-Up," December) was inspiring and encouraging to those of us who value Rand's ideas. Two minor criticisms should be made, however.

Rand, contrary to Gillespie, was not a philosophical materialist but a naturalist. Materialism is mainly reductive, claiming all is really nothing but matter in motion. Rand derides materialists as "mystics of the muscle."

Second, both Jennifer Burns' and Anne C. Heller's well-composed...