It is amusing to read your eulogy of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand, parading as a review of two recent books about her literary and political achievements (“Capitalism’s Martyred Hero,” October 24, 2009). Although you have little to say about literary critics who bemoan her “cardboard characters and tabloid style,” you go as far as to claim that “her readers reacted to her writings in much the same way that leftists reacted to reading Marx.” Marx was never a popular writer, though, and he never stooped to “insights” as threadbare as the one you credit to Rand, according to whom “society cannot thrive unless it is willing to give freedom to entrepreneurs and innovators.” Wow! Now it is you, too, who trade in cardboard characters and tabloid style. Rand versus Marx, no less! If she is popular in America once again, this still does not mean that she was more than a woman deeply affected by witnessing the Russian revolution and its aftermath as a Russian Jew. Granted, the experience must have been harrowing.