Out of a Gray Fog

Claudia Bruhwiler has accomplished something utterly remarkable in Out of the Gray Fog. She has captured - in beautiful, nuanced prose - a series of undiscovered connections between European and American intellectual life, and in doing so she has brought to life an unknown Ayn Rand, preoccupied not just with questions of political economy but of overcoming her Russian past while articulating a complex of ideas, stories and narratives intended for audiences in the United States, Europe, Russia and beyond. This original, path-breaking book is literary and intellectual history at its very best; it is an indispensable study of twentieth-century ideas. -- Michael Kimmage, The Catholic University of America
Claudia Franziska Brühwiler attempts, largely successfully, to dispel some of the “Gray Fog” that hangs over the question of Ayn Rand’s roots and reception in Western Europe.... It is possible...that “Ayn Rand’s Europe” is pretty much like “Ayn Rand’s America,” in the sense that the same sorts of people on both sides of the Atlantic love and hate her books, and do so for largely similar reasons. Ayn Rand’s Europe does much to illuminate this dynamic. One hopes that future analyses will follow Brühwiler’s lead in looking at what Rand actually says and to whom that appeals, rather than trying to shoehorn Rand’s Objectivism into preexisting political categories, be those European or American. * VoegelinView *
Out of a Gray Fog is an interesting account of Ayn Rand the person, her works, and her reception among different groups and countries. It is full of fascinating details for anyone interested in Rand and classical liberal philosophy overall. * Law & Liberty Book Review *