Rating: 
Summary: Exciting and inspiring!
Review: I found this book exciting, inspiring, courageous, and very personally helpful. It is written beautifully. To anyone who loves Ayn Rand's work, this book is a must. To anyone who has followed the work of "the father of self-esteem," this book is a revelation.
Rating:
Summary: A tragic, romantic epic
Review: I had never read anything that could be considered a "romance" story before, but after reading this book I can certainly see why that genre is so popular.
This is a fascinating, thrilling, and dramatic story of Nathaniel Branden's amazing roller-coaster life. Other reviewers have summed up the plot sufficiently, but my own summary would state that this is a book with a very cautionary message. The lessons Branden has learned over the course of his life are very important, yet also very dangerous if they are learned too late (as was Branden's situation). These life lessons include the importance of self-esteem, individualism, independence, and being able to identify true friends and lovers over phonies and exploiters.
The book is far from being an indictment of Objectivist philosophy per se, but it does convey a very strong message regarding the dangers of getting too closely involved in any group which places value in the "ownership" of truth above the persuit of truth.
Autobiographies like these can often make for the most exciting reads. I knew the basic history of the Objectivist movement in some vauge detail, and this book kept me engrossed as I wondered how the events the author described would eventually lead to the tragic conclusion I knew was coming. If Branden is good at nothing else, he is wonderful at creating a sense of suspense in his writing, and his use of foreshadowing in his chapter conclusions really makes this a hard book to put down.
It's hard to imagine how anyone could write a romance story more passionate, more tragic, or even more bizarre than this one. The constant twists and turns that this amazing story takes just proves that truth is often stranger than fiction.
Rating:
Summary: A superb read!
Review: I loved "Judgment Day" and I love "My Years with Ayn Rand" much more. The new book has such honesty, benevolence, and dignity. Apart from anything else, it is a tremendous love story--four love stories, really--Branden has lived quite a life!
Rating:
Summary: Engaging and thought-provoking
Review: I regard this as an excellent companion to Barbara Branden's "The Passion of Ayn Rand", to be read after it once you have an overview of Ayn's life; I often found myself cross-referencing between them. This memoir sheds a brand of personal light, written from the viewpoint of the man who was perhaps closest to the writer of "Atlas Shrugged".I found the honest tone of Mr. Branden's memoir almost painful in its quest for sincerity. His assessment of Ayn Rand as a great thinker who pointed out the right direction for a new philosophy without perfecting its details is in perfect accord with my own opinion, and his expectations for the future of Objectivism are inspiring. This memoir makes Ayn Rand very human, neither shying away from her faults nor disguising her virtues, and portrays her philosophical movement equally well, neither pandering to its admirerers nor insulting its detractors despite his own conviction in its basic premises. Objective writing at its finest.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: Intellectual pleasure at its best. I had alot of fun reading this book. It has many twists and turns about the author's experiences with Ayn Rand. Better than most fiction books I've read except this one's all true. Contains life lessons for everyone. I recommend reading it asap!
Rating:
Summary: A delightful meal
Review: It happens to be true that I have a quixotic fascination with human beings, and when I say this my emphasis is on individual human beings. And in this pursuit my delight leads me to those ardent pioneers of the human frontier, those triumphant in human exception or human oddity. Yes, both the possessed and the lunatics are mental fodder for me, and it is this frame of mind in which I regard this book.
So, are you curious about Ayn Rand? If you are, I would expect you to enjoy this book as I did. This woman was indeed a swell blend of possession and lunacy. She was possessed with a powerful beauty, a beauty so demanding and irrepresible that it forced an emergence into some of the most unshakably possessing novels I have ever experienced. In better moods I've given my copy of The Fountainhead a glance, just a brief glance, and have had so many exciting, wonderful memories flood over my awareness that I become convinced that the mere existence of such beauty is proof that mankind is going to make it.
Yet in all of Ayn Rand's writing, the Fountainhead included, there is a haunting air. An undulating bitterness and forlorness, right below the skin. It was obvious, at least to me, that Ayn Rand, despite her immense strength and radiant beauty, had some pain she had never come to terms with. And within this book the miserable, lonely little girl lost within distant shadows of Ayn Rand's soul becomes more clear than ever.
To discover such an exceptional and creative and unusual human being through the eyes of a lover, what a banquet for the soul!
But the delights of this book don't end there. From it one learns a great deal of Nathaniel Branden, a less colorful but no less exceptional human being, in whose life and writing I have repeatedly found inspiration and hope, and many, many other atypical people and events they become involved in. The early culture of the Objectivists, an intellectual movement inspired by Ayn Rand's ideas, is described in this book, and they were a peculiar lot to say the least.
So at this point it should be evident by what standard I grant this book five stars. If you as well seek out knowledge of unique human beings, then you will probably enjoy this book as I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Hell hath no fury: Branden's own story is fascinating
Review: Many people who are or were admirers of Ayn Rand heard about the devastating fallout of a love affair between Rand and her protege Nathaniel Branden. Rand was a mentor to the young Branden, who first contacted her while he was a teen in Ontario. She was impressed with his grasp of her philosophy Objectivism, and she, Branden, and Branden's future wife Barbara became friends, associates, and business partners. When Rand began an affair with Branden, they both naively felt it would not affect their marriages (!) nor the functioning of the burgeoning Objectivist movement and the Nathanial Branden Institute. However, the idealism and fascination of a young man for his exciting mentor was ultimately not enough to base an emotionally satisfying relationship between a man and a woman 25 years his senior. Branden wished to withdraw; Rand felt her self worth threatened by a younger, more beautiful woman. The resulting firestorm of recrimination by Rand against the Brandens was first rumored about, then exposed over a number of years in several books, one by Barbara Branden (The Passion of Ayn Rand) and this book by Branden. How could someone who was so passionate being coldly objective about facts AND emotions go so wildly off-course? Some of the answers, according to Branden as he saw it and experienced it, are here in this book. What is NOT here is rather surprising from a noted psychologist, such as Branden is today. An in-depth analysis of the logic of Rand's fury is only sketchily guessed at, the logic of emotions as kind of a weather-report about the ego is not much dealt with. And Branden scarcely deals with his own duality in idealizing the woman he's with (either Rand or his wife) with the woman he truly wants (Patrecia.) Nor does he deal in much depth with Rand's monumental ability to deny reality when it pleased her or her form of intellectual bullying; shouting and cold, vindictive fury as a way to intimidate are surprising from someone who knew an ad-hominem attack from a logical argument and would not hesitate to call it out. I would have been interested in an examination of the psychology of this as Branden could have analysed it. But that isn't in this book either. However...if you want the story from Branden's viewpoint, this is a must-read.
Rating:
Summary: Already a compelling memoir, made better and more pertinent
Review: Nathaniel Branden has reworked his memoir of his 20 years of romancing the mind of Ayn Rand -- before, during, and after he knew her on a daily and intimate basis -- into a more focused narrative with this second edition. He took the subtitle of the previous edition, made it the title of this one, and jettisoned his use of a famous Rand quote as an epigraph. ("Judge, and be prepared to be judged.") All were wise decisions, because this book is really not about Rand's judgments. They would have been difficult to get past -- especially her final sweeping, damaging, slanderous ones about Branden. But to focus too directly upon them ignores the story line, and it's one of a love story that reads like a novel. Branden fell in love as a teenager with the intellect that shone from "The Fountainhead." And by virtue of his own formidable intellect, along with an uncanny fit into the life of a writer who was missing a genuine challenge and grist in her friendships, he came to love the woman as well. He couldn't handle so many varieties of love at once, and their being present in one skein of interactions that ranged from metaphysics to physical admiration in bed. Such lucid and candid self-admission is what I doubt has been seen this clearly since the extraordinary life of Benvenuto Cellini, in his own famed Renaissance autobiography. For either edition, I couldn't fathom those who see "self-aggrandizement" running rampant on Branden's part. He doesn't minimize his intellect or achievements in publicizing and even, in part, integrating Rand's philosophic work. Nor should he, with the memory hole that Leonard Peikoff and others have erected regarding his role. (I would have been far more bitter than Branden is about such immature revisionist efforts.) If anything, Branden is much too hard on himself, considering the detachment from reality that Rand was capable of creating in her worst moments. He bends over backwards to insist on limning many of her best moments. In how he respects and compactly describes Rand's achievements, he shows that in one sense, his "years with Rand" never really ended. They still live in his mind and heart. What had been added to them, after 1968, were the years of Nathaniel Branden, a person and innovator in psychology that he had suppressed. Branden is, indeed, much less sharp with some of his former associates and "Collective" members than he had been 10 years ago. One exception to Branden's rounder edges, and well aimed in light of 10 years of public absurdity, is with Peikoff. Branden doesn't hesitate to point out the roots of the mess Peikoff has made with the role of Objectivist thought in the wider culture. His own 1950s warnings to Peikoff, his ex-wife's cousin, are even more timely to re-read in light of the many sycophants that Peikoff has gathered to his side. Unlike Branden, Peikoff apparently has never tried to re-own his self. Another decade has also improved Branden's appraisal of and regard for his ex-wife Barbara, and rightly so. They were not on the best of terms in the mid-to-late '80s, partly from the contrast between their biography/memoir efforts, and that obscured some genuine mutual respect. The one lengthy addition to this new version, that of his current (third) wife Devers' encounter with Rand, is superbly revelatory of several strains of Rand's personality that Branden depicts throughout his memoir. It makes the tragedy of Rand and Branden more poignant, in showing what emotions and inner conflicts Rand could never quite give up upon in her own life ... even when this could have helped make her whole. Nathaniel Branden won't say so, here or anywhere, even obliquely, but he was the love of Rand's life, and he remains the prime shaper of all of her public role beyond that of novelist. That makes his story compelling. I have one mild complaint and one subtle plaudit about this edition. I had hoped for some more detail about Branden's relationship with his third great love and second wife, Patrecia. He may have held back on adding more detail out of wanting to include the episode with Ayn and Devers, and that was probably the better choice for his narrative and for his slice of intellectual history. Branden did, though, do better this time with his use of photographs. These end up being more evocative than those in the first edition (though slightly fewer), largely from their being placed at timely points in the body of the book, rather than being a single section in the middle. I was glad that the fascinating Patrecia did, at least, get an additional and striking photo, along with her husband, on an Aspen mountaintop. And, also, that two different photos of Rand, with their handwritten inscriptions to Branden, were newly included. Nice defense against the memory hole ... take that, Lenny. When I spoke briefly to Branden 10 years ago after a talk he gave about his memoir, I said that the story he told called for a happy ending in the best and most innocent storytelling sense, and that I saw it in how he described life with Devers -- and in the photo of her arms around his neck, the last in the book. You'll understand why I found text and photo so compelling if you try the whole of this intelligent and passionate memoir.
Rating: 
Summary: Life with a sacred monster
Review: Nathaniel Branden, one helluva brave and tenacious man, conducts us through the years of his relationship with the brilliant and impossibly difficult Ayn Rand, through the inception and growth of the Objectivist movement and the interactions of its central leadership, "the Collective." It's utterly fascinating to watch these giants of mind, ego, and wrongheadedness having at one another, rather like war among the dinosaurs. Branden spares no one in his recollections, himself least of all. This is both a period piece and a psychological exposition, and once fairly into it you can't put the daggone thing down.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting autobiograpy/socio-intellectual history.
Review: Persons who know the facts of the Objectivist movement's history (facts primarily ignored by the Michael Paxton film) will know that it was Nathaniel Branden who was the prime architect of the movement. Through courses offered by Nathaniel Branden Lectures, later Nathaniel Branden Institute, the philosophy of Objectivism qua philosophy was first taught to the world. Those familiar with the basic outlines of Nathaniel Branden's eventful life will also know: that he and Ayn Rand met and became friends when he was going on 20 and she was 45; that some years later they began an affair with the consent of their respective spouses; that the dramatic end of their personal and professional relationship in 1968 had explosive effects for the entire Objectivist community. Branden has previously told the story of his life and relationship with Ayn Rand in the controversial memoir *Judgment Day* (1989). The present memoir is an extensively revised and updated version of the earlier book. Even readers who have read (and reread) *Judgment Day* will be fascinated by the new insights to be gleaned. *My Years with Ayn Rand* is as spellbindingly written as the previous work but it presents a richer, more complete account. This is a not-to-be-missed by anyone interested in Objectivism -- or simply interested in the engrossing story of some remarkable people.
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