Here's the page for The Ayn Rand Cult at amazon dot com.
Here's the Ayn Rand Institute and the Institute for Objectivist Studies.
What the hell, here's Nathaniel Branden's homepage.

I've been interested in Ayn Rand's life and work for, good lord, going on thirty years now. I was never convinced, mind you -- I knew even at 15 or so, when I read Atlas Shrugged, that it was pulp fiction -- but it sure was exciting reading a story based on the inescapable but generally unacknowledged fact that mediocrities playing politics almost always crush the creative. I've also given quite a bit of study to religious cults, even before the Moonies courted me in the mid-70's (but particularly since then).

So Ayn Rand Cult was one of those "buy it on sight" books. And well worth it, too, for its detailed research and excellent documentation. No one with more than a casual interest in Rand and Objectivism should hesitate to read it. Still, in several ways, I was very disappointed.

Walker seems to want to keep piling up evidence that Objectivism is indeed a cult. But this is more or less obvious to anyone who has ever tried to argue with an Objectivist. And the quality of his evidence is highly variable. His frequent out-of-the-blue comparisons to Rajneesh, in particular, actually weaken his argument by their inaptitude.

There are chapters on prominent Randroids Nathaniel Branden (Rand's lover and heir-apparent until their messy split-up in 1968), Leonard Peikoff (the current leader of orthodox Objectivism), and Alan Greenspan (unelected financial-czar-for-life of the United States). Also on "The Cult While the Guru Lived" and "The Cult After the Guru's Death". But you've got to really wrestle with the darn thing to get the history.

Walker has an infuriating habit of dropping last names into the discussion as if we're supposed to know who he's talking about. You look back over the last few paragraphs; nope. Check the index; look up a few references; ah. Here it is several pages later. Or maybe in the bibliography.

OK, it's a great bibliography. The endnotes are exemplary. The index is reasonably thorough. And the history is there if you dig for it. There's even some interesting pre-history: chapters on "The Roots of Objectivism" and "The Disowned Ancestry of Atlas Shrugged". Finally, the Chronology in front is admittedly very helpful. I just wish the text itself had been organized along chronological lines. Anyway, better organized somehow.

But, then, it's really no good thinking too hard about the "Ayn Rand Cult that might have been" -- had Walker been a better writer or (better yet) had a better editor. This is the book we've got and it's far and away the best single work on its subject known to me (Branden's Judgment Day is next) and the best we're likely to get. "Existence exists -- and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." To coin a phrase.