This is a small and quiet pearl of a book: a handful of discourses driven by Rand interspersed with a number of microbiographies of how various students and professionals met and worked with him. A disparaging review on Amazon called it "the equivalent of a collection of out takes, the stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor, which gets added onto DVD's as a an extra feature" and I think that is fair! But also the outtakes are fun and interesting and gave me more things to think about and books into which to research than most other books of its size: which, to be clear, is extremely small. This is a book that will take you forty minutes to read and another forty minutes to ponder and is worth the price of admission, but it is not a treatise or a thesis. It is snippets of interesting and thought-provoking conversations, and that's valuable in of itself.

★★★★