Withhold the perpetual motion machine he built (yes, Galt building a perpetual motion machine happens) until the government lifts restrictions. Use his incredible skills to join the government and change it from the inside. Use his massive charisma to lead a nonviolent takeover of the government. Use his oratory skills to inspire the people to a widespread revolt. Create a grassroots political movement using his charisma and oration. Convince industrialists to ignore unjust laws, and let the results speak for themselves, prompting people to demand government change. Issue an ultimatum threatening a strike rather than disappearing without telling anyone why, Mount a legal attack on laws he disagrees with. Take his talents to another country, demonstrating how fast a nation can flourish under his ideals.

Ayn Rand believes that people are only sexually attracted to people who share their values, and that love for a person is basically the same as love for one's company. (This is obviously not true, for anyone who has ever interacted with actual humans).

The novel has a pervasive theme of anti-intellectualism. Colleges are bad.

There is an air of sexism- Dagny is the only woman of any importance in the novel, and she feels most "feminine" when she is being dominated by men.

Objectivism is violently opposed to environmentalism- the world is there to be used up by men, and objectivists believe that because industrialism has created some ways of protecting us from environmental disasters, it doesn't make sense to reduce it to protect that environment.

The novel supports the belief that no physical labor is as difficult as mental labor.

There are racist and imperialist undercurrents- phrases like "pesthole of Asia" abound, and Rand dismisses the idea that any wisdom can be gained from "Eastern" cultures.

Rand believes her philosophy is one hundred percent correct, with no room for input from anyone else.

Rand states that great artists are basically the same type of people as great industrialists.

The talented characters in Atlas Shrugged are magically able to succeed at whatever field they choose with no training. They all are great at physical and mental labor, and know how to fly planes and handle guns.

There's a six page summary of Objectivism at the end of the novel. It completely negates the need for a 1200 page novel which has the same exact goal.

Ayn Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, has become one of the most popular novels in America in the past few decades. Despite this, it's hard to find people who have read it- for the simple reason that it's 1220 pages long. Making it officially the longest book I have ever read. And I read a lot of long books. Anyway, I've witnessed many arguments over Ms. Rand, and her philosophy of Objectivism, so I decided to read it so I could have an informed opinion. I must admit that I entered the book with a low opinion of Objectivism based on what I'd read about it on the internet. However, I did my best to read it with an open mind. In this review, I'll talk about what I liked, what I didn't, and whatever else pops into my head.Since few people have read the book, here's a brief summary. Dagny Taggart runs a transcontinental railroad company in an indeterminate time in the future United States, but struggles with the increasingly controlling government. All of the nation's industrialists and great minds have been vanishing for years, leaving their works to rot. [SPOILERS] It turns out that a brilliant inventor named John Galt has been convincing them to "go on strike," to prevent "looters" from benefitting from their talents. This is a "plot twist." Anyway, Dagny finds this out about halfway through the book, and spends 600 pages deciding that she will join them. Eventually, with America a desolate wasteland, John Galt declares it is time for the great minds to return.Firstly, the things I liked. There were quite a few little sequences that had me unable to put down the book. There's an airplane chase which is fairly riveting. I also liked three or four of the book's minor characters, the only ones who really qualified as "dynamic." Even though I find Objectivism mostly repulsive (more on that later), there were some elements of it which rang true. I agree that people should mostly act through reason, and that money in itself is not evil. Other than these elements, I can't recall much of anything in Atlas Shrugged that I enjoyed.Objectivism is essentially the belief that human beings are rational, and the primary objective of a person's life should be to fulfill their own happiness (Side note: Any introductory level psychology course will show you why "objective" reality is a hazy concept). The name comes from the belief that reality is objective, i.e. that it is the same for everyone, and can only be perceived, not created. Objectivism finds altruism appalling, and considers industrial capitalism to be the height of morality. Frankly, I found the implications fairly disgusting. I think it's fairly obvious why objectivism's endorsement of selfishness is unappealing to many people (myself included), so I won't go into great detail on that count. Many philosophers have already pointed out objectivism's inherent flaws already, so instead I'm going to focus on the flaws in Rand's presentation of her beliefs. For those who are interested, an excellent historical and philosophical dissection of the book can be found here. It's lengthy, but worth the time.Every page of Atlas Shrugged is intended to explain and promote objectivism. Though it's difficult to write an entire novel promoting or detracting a specific ideology, it can be done well. A good example would be George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Atlas Shrugged, Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in a dystopian future in which a repressive government has squashed the populace and distorts the news through force. But the difference is that while Nineteen Eighty-Four has realistic, meaningful characters and a poignant plot, Atlas Shrugged has no characters. It only has two or three basic types of people, who are repeated over and over again with different names and industries. The plot also fails to impress- you can predict the entire book after a few hundred pages. But the problems go on.Ayn Rand doesn't appear to understand characterization. The people in her stories are, with a few minor exceptions, entirely one dimensional. The "good" characters are also the most attractive and athletic, while the "bad" characters are ugly and have terrible posture. This is an extremely basic way of tricking the reader into caring about the fake people who express no emotions and come off as totally unlikeable. Seriously, these people are self-righteous, arrogant robots. It's quite ironic that Rand implies that she disagrees with the works of Plato, because his 2500 year old writings are far more readable than her contemporary novels. The idiosyncratic Socrates a reader meets in Symposium is a more compelling character than anyone in Atlas Shrugged.One of the major points in the novel is that collectivist systems are both doomed to failure, and are the height of evil. Really, the height of evil. There are examples of successful communes all over the world, from the anarcho-socialist communities in Spain that so impressed Orwell, to the kibbutz movement in Israel. So why is Rand so vehement in her hatred of any form of collective? Because when she was a child in Russia, the Bolsheviks seized her family's business. Suddenly, the reasoning behind her thinking is a little more clear- it's part of a lifelong personal vendetta based on childhood misfortune. Is this a lightly supported conjecture? Yes. Is it any more loosely grounded in reality than some of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged? No.The industrialist's strike is John Galt's brilliant plan for saving America. The plan includes the complete collapse of government, infrastructure, economy, and society in America. The thousands that will die are part of the plan. In ten minutes, I came up with nine plans that would kill no one, leave America's infrastructure intact, and take less time than the twelve years John Galt's plan took.The problems with Atlas Shrugged are so numerous, and it's really too boring of a book to spend much more time on, so I'm going to resort to bullet points of the parts that bugged me the most. I think this is an acceptable technique, given that John Galt uses it during his 60 page speech near the end of the book.In closing, I want to talk about the actual quality of the writing. The pacing in Atlas Shrugged is all over the place, but for the most part, it's incredibly slow. Scenes of industrialists going on strike are repeated over and over, with no variation. The book is too long by far, and part of the reason is that characters occasionally break into extended, repetitive monologues rehashing the same philosophical points. The longest is sixty pages, and it's difficult to maintain any kind of interest. Rand's prose is amateurish- she simply isn't a good enough writer to create a story on this kind of scale. Twists are seen coming many pages ahead, and the story is just not compelling enough to make you forget about the characters. Atlas Shrugged isn't just a work of dangerous philosophy- it's a bad book. Read Nineteen Eighty-Four instead.