This essay compares audio recordings of Ayn Rand's question and answer sessions with Robert Mayhew's renditions as published in the Estate-approved volume Ayn Rand Answers. Mayhew, it turns out, rewrote nearly every answer included in the book. He abridged long answers, rearranged parts of answers, left transcription errors uncorrected, and was frequently insensitive to Rand's style of speaking. Mayhew even deleted portions of a few answers deemed embarrassing to Leonard Peikoff and the Estate of Ayn Rand (e.g., references to cigarette (...) smoking or to Nathaniel Branden) and kept other answers (e. g., about homosexuality or amphetamine use) out of the volume entirely. (shrink)

100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Kandis an enjoyable compendium of mostly favorable interviews of those who knew or met Ayn Rand. While it contains many valuable insights about Rand and her life, it fails to achieve its objective in providing a good selection of interviews of those who knew Rand in various "contexts" and "relationships," contrary to what editor Scott McConnell claims. Those who are interested in the movement side of Objectivism, which developed in the 1950s and 1960s, (...) will be disappointed in the lack of attention paid to this part of her life. (shrink)

In an examination of recently recovered materials from Russian archival sources, Sciabarra expands on his earlier studies of Rand's secondary and university education in Silver Age Russia (see the Fall 1999 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies essay, "The Rand Transcript"). He uncovers new details that are consistent with his historical theses, first presented in the 1995 book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. He reexamines the case for a connection between Rand and N. O. Lossky, and proposes a possible parallel between (...) Lossky and a character Rand called "Professor Leskov" in an early draft of the novel, We the Living. (shrink)